This is all about Apple

The partnership that Nokia announced with Microsoft is really all about Apple- and they’re hoping they can derail Apple’s dominance in the mobile phone and tablet space. As the world leader in cellphones, this isn’t a small decision for Nokia. It says a lot about their planned end of life cycle with Symbian, even though Nokia still plans to sell another 150 million Symbian-based phones (more than twice the installed base of Blackberries). The strategy as announced is that Windows Phone 7 will be Nokia’s OS in going after the smartphone and tablet markets. They’ve drawn their line in the sand against Apple (and Google) on how they’re going to fight.

So what does this mean to the mobile market? Let’s think out loud here- the largest cell manufacturer in the world is betting not on open source software (hmmm Google, are you listening?) but on well researched, well funded and well supported Windows. Nokia is adopting Windows Phone as its principal mobile strategy. And Microsoft gets the largest mobile manufacturer in the world. Nokia will help drive the future of Windows Phone by bringing its expertise on hardware design, language support, and help in bringing Windows to a larger range of mobile price points, market segments and geographies. In layman terms it’s equivalent to “Real Big + Real Big = Huge”. As Steve Ballmer succinctly stated “the partnership provides incredible scale, vast expertise in hardware and software innovation and a proven ability to execute”.

For Nokia, they picked Microsoft to stay on top of their mobile game which is moving at incredible speed. While Android might have looked attractive as an alternative for Nokia’s fledgling smartphone business, if Nokia were to back it, this would make them just another Android licensee. And while Nokia could have used some Google in their software ecosystem, it would have been hard to differentiate at the hardware level and thus be thrust against the dozens of Android handset vendors chasing the growing mobile market.

The real winner here for mobile market space is Microsoft- this is a huge, huge win. Nokia offers Microsoft the world. This deal has much more to do about Microsoft expanding their mobile platforms around the world and leveraging Nokia’s worldwide position to do this. As an aside, it’s interesting to note Google’s reaction to this partnership. CEO Schmidt confirmed that Google had held extensive talks with Nokia on a possible partnership before the world's largest handset maker decided to go with Microsoft's Windows operating platform.

The battle lines are drawn now- Apple, Google and Microsoft. The sweet spot is the “prosumer”- the mobile market where enterprise and consumer meet. Apple did it first with the iPhone. Then they completely nailed it with the iPad, selling 15 million tablets in 8 months. Sure, there will be Blackberries and Playbooks and Galaxy Tabs and Motorola XOOMs too, but the company to beat is Apple and that’s what Nokia and Microsoft are trying to do.

Bye the way, there’s terrific news here for hereiam as a company. We work well on all three platforms- very, very well!