Timing is everything...
I guess the ‘big thing’ at this year’s MWC was the pre-show announcement by Nokia and Microsoft. Is it the right answer to Nokia’s market share slide? Can two elephants dance? Whatever your view on this, I was left with the distinct impression that the decision was made fairly close to the actual announcement.
As a result of the proximity of the announcement to the show, Nokia definitely missed a number of tricks. At the trivial level both companies presence at the event could have been aligned more effectively. Of greater importance was the fact that neither companies’ developer communities were effectively mobilized to support the announcement. One suspects because the haste of the announcement the roadmap has still to be worked out leaving Nokia developers feeling out in the cold and Microsoft’s machine-like ability to mobilize hundreds of developers to their cause not yet in gear.
Lacking a roadmap, and acting in haste, Nokia also missed the lesson from history. Psion spun out their OS. Developing a world class OS can be costly and Psion were struggling to compete with other, more commodity, hand held devices and control of the OS gave them no advantage at the high end. Substitute ‘hand held devices’ with mobile phones and the picture is remarkably similar.
So rather than making the in-house development team redundant, why not spin them off as a separate business under separate ownership and OEM back the OS? This clearly apportions costs, and, as the OS developers are no longer sheltered (or stifled) by being in a large bureaucracy they may become extremely competitive. This would keep Microsoft on its toes by giving Nokia an ‘each way’ bet at no cost.
It will be interesting to see how Nokia and Microsoft are doing by the time next year’s MWC comes around, but what is clear is that they both have a lot of hard work to do to even start catching up with Android.
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