Struggling Finnish smartphone specialist 'now in a three-horse race'
Telecoms giant Nokia has announced a major strategic alliance with Microsoft, in a new bid to revitalise its ailing mobile business.
Future Nokia smartphones will run on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system, the company has announced.
Nokia’s existing mobile operating systems, such as Symbian, are to be gradually sidelined.
What the deal means for the Ovi Store, or any of Nokia’s development platforms, remains to be seen.
The announcement comes days after Nokia CEO Stephen Elop warned staff that the company was “standing on a burning platform”.
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Today he says the smartphone market is “now a three-horse race".
Esop added: “Nokia and Microsoft will combine our strengths to deliver an ecosystem with unrivalled global reach and scale.”
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s Chief Executive, said: "I am excited about this partnership with Nokia. Ecosystems thrive when fuelled by speed, innovation and scale. The partnership announced today provides incredible scale, vast expertise in hardware and software innovation and a proven ability to execute."
Microsoft’s Bing will now run on Nokia’s search services, the companies said. Meanwhile, Nokia’s own Maps service will be integrated into Microsoft's mapping services.
I can't help but feel that this is a big mistake by Nokia again, with very little understanding about how they've arrived at the position they are in.
Neither them or Microsoft have a competitive advantage or uniqueness to lever in the mobile market like they did a decade ago.
Operating systems on PC are already devolving back into a 3 horse race(Microsoft/MacOS/Linux) mainly trigger by iPod/iMac/iPhone success. The mobile O/S market is going the other way, were content availability is forcing it in to a straight 2 horse race (Android 2.3/iOS) with everything else in the also ran market(Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile) like IBM's O/2 Warp was at the time of Window NT.
If a device as well designed and customized as the SE Xperia X1 & X2 (made by HTC running Windows Mobile 6.5) couldn't compete with iPhone, then h/w from Nokia(& Blackberry) & Microsoft s/w(XboxLive/Bing/IE) should realise they all need to go Android 2.3 very fast, so they are at least in the race, rather than waste millions over the next two years falling further behind.
As long as Windows 7 phones don't support running native code using c++ it will be a fail platform. Companies can't port their iPhone and Android games to Windows phones without it I'm afraid. And why would you rewrite your whole game in say XNA just to support 10% or so of the other phones?
So I don't think you will see many popular games from the iPhone and Android on any Windows 7 phones.
As a small independant game dev (iphone/PC/MAC) I agree 100% with both previous post. Microsoft, stop being stupid and give us access to c++ or we won't even bother dowloading your SDK. Nokia, what a bad move, go the Android way and you'll have some apps for your phone. All of this is so obvious, I wonder what these companies are really thinking... The end user can't care less about witch OS is in their phone, they just want some good apps on it and easy to get them.
JC
