Nokia has yet another mobile platform
by Volker Weber
From the Nokia press release:
With Nokia's planned move to Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform, Symbian becomes a franchise platform, leveraging previous investments to harvest additional value. This strategy recognizes the opportunity to retain and transition the installed base of 200 million Symbian owners. Nokia expects to sell approximately 150 million more Symbian devices in the years to come.
Under the new strategy, MeeGo becomes an open-source, mobile operating system project. MeeGo will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences. Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year.
In feature phones, Nokia unveiled a renewed strategy to leverage its innovation and strength in growth markets to connect the next billion people to their first Internet and application experience.
Let me count this:
- Nokia is going to build Windows Phones
- Symbian is a dead man walking
- MeeGo is a dead baby not walking
- Nokia is continuing with feature phones on a separate platform
You know what? I am so looking forward to a Nokia Windows Phone 7. I like the software and I love the hardware.
Comments
And I think it might be a bad move :( I think the Symbian+Meego+Qt made a lot more sense - there must be more to it than only bad execution. Maybe MeeGo is a lot less finished than we all think.
Elopocalypse has come over us ;) ;) ;)
BTW, Volker, I absolutely agree with your last sentence. I got the brand new E7 yesterday (personally delivered by a Nokia representative and two nice ladies, no kidding ;) ) - man, this is one gorgeous device.
Now imagine that hardware with WP7 - yes :)
I really like it. Sounds like very promising eco system to me.
Well the biggest competitor to Nokia probably is Samsung. Samsung currently supports Bada, Android and Windows Phone 7. Nokia now supports Windows Phone 7 and a bit Symbian.
I hope Nokia gets some cash for this deal.
Henning, I fear it was probably the other way round ;)
I would have really liked to see exclusivity from Nokias side for WP7. They say they want to define and drive WP7, but I think exclusivity would have been an important thing.
On the other side this would have brought several problems:
- whatever contracts MS has with the other vendors - can they just tell them to stop? Probably not
- the other vendors would 100% focus on Android. This way they probably help WP7 survive until 'the Nokia effect' kicks in
- the other vendors will probably go away from WP7 anyway if Nokia strong enough defines WP7
It will take probably a year (and that would be really fast) before Nokia ships the first product with WP7. I would love to be proven wrong here.
I am really split up about this announcement. It is having huge potential, but that also was the case with Symbian /Meego covered by Qt. Now its all a mess ;) Plus the relative silence about OVI - well, well...
If new devices take one year then Nokia is in big trouble. Who is going to buy an expensive Smartphone with Symbian now?
Everything longer than 6 months (max) would be a real surprise to me. I expect 3 months until we see the first Nokia WM7 devices.
I must confess that Stephen Elop has not convinced me yet leading Nokia but I am not an expert in mobile (Volker is).
PS: Not that I disagree but HP has exclusivity with webOS.
It's a sad day anyway. Nokiathrows away everyhthing they had achieved after the first symbian-communicator ten years ago. I'd rather wished they had the guts to throw away their old s60-ui in 2007 and develop a new ui on symbian, with faster-time-to-market also for the hardware. Maybe for consumers it will not matter, but for nokia-fans andy qt-/symbian-developers this is hard to swallow. I also wonder how they differentiate their devices from htc wm7, toshiba wm7, huawei mm7 etc.
It'll be interesting to see how Phone 7 will treat the business sector in the future.
Also I'm looking forward to the App Planets at MWC next week.
Mmh, ein halb-blinder, im Sterben liegender Mann lässt sich von einem Zombie stützen. Mehr fällt mir zu der Partnerschaft nicht ein.
Yesss!
If I have the choice between WP7, Android and iPhone I'll choose WP7 :-)
--hfrmobile
PS: http://www.pledgebank.com/hfrmobile-wp7
"I like the software and I love the hardware." Sums it up nicely. Sounds like a prosperous marriage to me. Never underestimate the zombies and the blind...
Wow, what a smart move. Now Nokia has access to a modern OS with an open architecture wich they can fully customize according to all their needs to come. And by now they have also found a partner who has a proven track record about his willingness to share und who's strategy is on eco systems and common growth instead of persuing monopolistic market positions.
This is truely a great choice and gives them a lot of strategic options for the future.
Oh wait. It is Microsoft's OS they choose?
My bad, sorry folks.
P.S. Is it only me who sees selling sharp knifes in certain areas of Redmond and Finnland as a realistic business opportunity coming up quite soon?
This strategy worked very well for Palm, right? Let's try it ourselves.
Rui Carmo says it better, though.
Has Microsoft ever partnered with any other company, such that their partner has benefited from the experience? I can't think of any examples off hand.
David, I was reminded of Palm building WinMo devices myself. That was a bad move. I was also not impressed by Nokias decision to veer off their Symbian/Meego/Qt path. But I could clearly see it coming. All three components have tremendous growth pains.
Palm and Nokia are completely different cases though. Palm had a great ecosystem of developers (you were one), but they did not have the carriers. Nokia is the other way around. Developers are fleeing Nokia 's platforms while they have excellent carrier connections.
Nokia will have to come up with WP7 devices really fast, and I don't think that is going to be a problem. Microsoft has a reference implementation down to the chip set. They will have to package that in the excellent Nokia packaging and I believe we will see Nokia WP7 devices with this reference implementation really soon.
It gets interesting after that wave when phone makers have to decide how they want to proceed. Currently all WP7 devices are alike with little differentiation.
Msft is still building out the business platform on WP7. They have a clean architecture that is going to grow quickly in that direction. I think within one year, we will see the impact.
I really don't get it. Nokia fears Google and doesn't want to become a me-too hardware manufacturer. Therefore it decides to go with Windows Phone 7 - the ultimate me-too manufacturer based on a restrictive licensing and biz model of the 80s?
That logic is 'eloping' me!
Sad. I really liked Maemo/Meego and still scratch my head why Nokia wasn't able to turn it into a real-world desirable phone OS.
I was waiting for the E7, and now I am not so sure anymore. Dear Nokia, others were better than you were, overtook you, then you did things surprisingly well and somewhat caught up even, only to now do everything again and whoever buys your phones now (i.e., today) is f***ed?
