Rafe Blandford, from All About Symbian/Al About MeeGo, has published what is most likely the most complete and in-depth analysis of the Nokia/Microsoft deal, taking just about everything into account. His conclusion? You may not expect it considering the sites he works for, but he concludes that partnering with Microsoft was the best (i.e., least bad) choice. “So in assessing the relative risks and potential return between the two strategies, my opinion is that by following the ‘go it alone strategy’ Nokia would see a continued gradual decline in the face of intense competition and a less competitive surrounding ecosystem. By contrast, partnering with Microsoft offers Nokia the opportunity, although not the guarantee, to reverse its recent decline and potentially return to its dominant position in mobile.”
An exceedingly interesting alternate take on the matter: http://www.asymco.com/2011/02/21/nokias-burning-ships-strategy/
I mean…
everybody understands why they HAD TO make a deal with some third party company to provide them an OS in these times of crisis, but, moving Meego and Qt to the basement and “punish them” because of bad management practices has no excuse; at the end, they lost the possibility to be the owners of their own destiny and to shapre the mobile OS future.
Let’s hope Intel will put a lot of effort and resources to bring Meego to the mobile/netbook/desktop OSes mainstream.
Edited 2011-02-25 16:22 UTC
That’s pretty much *the* critical argument in the entire piece. Its assumed that Nokia will be the number one windows 7 device manufacturer.
Why, you ask ?
Because they will be able to differentiate their phones and other manufacturers wont.
Won’t that disrupt the idea behind windows phone 7 and make software upgrades more difficult?
No, because they won’t have to differentiate because they will be the number one windows phone hardware maker.
Its better written than your average joe bloe blog, but the logic isn’t any better than anyone elses.
I find that part of the article quite funny. The market for Windows Phone devices is absolutely miniscule next to IOS and Android. Thinking that it’s all good because you’re going to dominate a market (not the market) sounds like a one eyed man in the land of the blind type strategy.
The diffrentiation is expected from HW quality and brand strength. MS also hopes Nokia will bring some of its famous energy saving magic to the table. The problem is whole expertise was for symbian and omap Arm11 boards that will not run WP7. Integrating these skill on the framework of WinCE that is as foreign to Nokia eng. culture as it gets will not be easy.
Elop wasn’t very verbose about proposed Nokia UI wise improvements. I suspect MS counts on them not being able to pull off any large scale customizations. First reaction from HTC was “fantastic news!”. The don’t look terribly scared from nokia diffrentiation.
If you give up control of your platform for a platform you have zero control over, and it’s going to take over a year to bring that new platform in then you die. It’s that simple.
The best option is to get your act together over your own platform. The least worst option is to go for an OS that has some market share, ideally where you can get your hands on the code. This is just exceptionally weak:
How’s that going to be different to Microsoft and how are they going to change anything without any form of development access to the core platform like Android where they can hurry things along? Anyone who thinks Nokia will really have this with WP is an idiot.
Oh, and the Android app store is larger than anything WP’s will ever be. People don’t want a third app store on one supplier. It’s taken long enough for Android just to catch up to Apple. Nokia had the Ovi store, and now they’re going back to square one again?
The article doesn’t explain why the Microsoft option would be.
In short, what’s happening is that Nokia are not going to be producing anything new with Symbian at all, and certainly not Meego, so they’re in limbo for at least a year until Microsoft comes up with something on their hardware. In a market like this waiting like that, as Nokia have done for years incidentally, that spells death.
When WP phones actually start shipping from Nokia their Symbian market share will have imploded in the face of iOS and especially Android, because they’ve said they’re not going to do anything to prop it up, and will have an OS on their phones that has as much market share that few care about.
This article make zero sense. They’re dead because they haven’t got up off their own backsides.
I still can’t believe Nokia didn’t hustle some kind of exclusivity deal for the Windows Phone.
If Windows Phone is going to be successful long term (25% market share or more), great for MS and Elop’s stock, but Nokia has done nothing to differentiate itself from the other WP manufacturers. In such a scenario, they have also shed the low-end market that is currently keeping them afloat. So where is the competitive advantage? The distribution channels? They will have dried up by the time WP ever gets released on a low-end Nokia device. Five years from now, any market currently served by S40 based phones will have been replaced by Android.
Nokia might be trying to reinvent itself as a luxury brand phone like iPhone, but without exclusivity, their phone will be easily emulated by Samsung, HTC, etc.
So all Nokia has to do is “get their act together” and develop an Android OS package to complete with Google’s OEMS.
If Nokia could develop a phone OS in a raesonable time and for a reasonable cost they would not be in this pickle. As Einstein said doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is insanity.
Previously, Nokia is Symbian only (MeeGo is yet complete). Now, Nokia is going to be WP7 only.
As far as I can see, they are still doing the same thing all over again. This time round is worst, they would be starting from zero…
Though, I believe, WP7 should see a significant push, if Nokia able to produce WP7 fast enough.
Nokia had two working smartphone operating systems – Symbian and Maemo. Symbian runs great on low-powered hardware and has legacy app support. With Qt on it, it’s still got some life in it, at least for a transitional period. Maemo, on the other hand, had great future potential. After 4 years in development (from 2005), Nokia had a great Maemo handset (N900). Full Debian OS at the core, easy to port desktop software to it (OpenOffice, Gimp), rather than having to rewrite it from ground up (like for Android’s Dalvik) and the potential to carve out a whole new niche – a full computer in a pocket (bluetooth for peripherals, HDMI outputs for display attachments).
Couldn’t agree more. Nokia had great software and hardware, ready to ship. And yet a stream of very unwise management decisions and lack of focus succeeded in essentially destroying what great potential they had for building their own ecosystem.
I don’t dispute the first point, but I reckon MS does provide the sources to oems so they can customize the kernel to their hardware, so Nokia probably will have access the the sources. However, that will not help them as their expertise is not in MS technologies unlike all the other oems which have had a history with wm so that is a lot of time wasted in retraining staff or hiring new staff.
Amusingly there is going to be a huge shuffling of engineering and yet the middle management (that has gotten Nokia in this position) seems to be staying exactly the same.
Yet again internet fails at putting together all the pieces.
I totally agree!
Maybe you can built a system for it?
For what it’s worth, my Omnia is going to stay in service for a while more. Partly because Windows Phone 7 lacks some critical features (Copy&Paste?? It was crazy not to have that…) and now partly because when WP will run on Nokias… it will be best of both worlds !
Let’s cut Microsoft some slack here, you don’t really need Copy & Paste so much if you don’t have multitasking. Not that that’s much to be proud of, though…
This is typical of the the worthless superficial analysis that you find in business school case studies.
Unless you have access to all the relevant information and know the decison makers personally your opinions on the strategy are worthless.