Inevitable, in retrospect
Mobile phone giant Nokia has formally announced its adoption of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 as its principal smartphone platform, ending weeks of speculation about what Nokia was going to do to revive its flagging fortunes.
"Nokia and Microsoft will combine our strengths to deliver an ecosystem with unrivalled global reach and scale," said Stephen Elop, Nokia President and CEO. "It's now a three-horse race."
"I am excited about this partnership with Nokia," said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO. "Ecosystems thrive when fueled 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."
Note Elop wasted no time in dismissing BlackBerry and webOS as mobile platforms; his quote has Nokiasoft (our term), iOS and Android as the only players. While we can't question the scale of the combined operations, we think it's telling that Ballmer identified speed as a key component of a thriving ecosystem, but chose not to attribute that quality to the partnership.
The reason Nokiasoft exists at all is that both companies failed to keep up with the rate of change, defined by Apple, in the smartphone market. It took three years for Microsoft to adequately respond to the launch of the iPhone, while Nokia had its collective head completely buried in the sand until the board finally woke up and appointed Elop.
In fact you have to wonder, in retrospect, whether the Elop appointment was made with this partnership in mind from the very start. While we opined it would be a bad idea a week ago - and there are still many unanswered questions that we'll address in our follow-up analysis of this news - we did anticipate this move at the start of the week. With Elop having championed the alliance with Nokia when he was at Microsoft, it just looked like too big a coincidence.
UPDATE - 09:30, 11 Feb 2011: Here's a quick video of the two main men talking up the deal.
