On March 11, Nokia filed a 200-page 20-F form (PDF) with the Securities and Exchange Commission, providing us with some sweet details about the company’s recent partnership with Microsoft.
The form comfirms that the two companies have not yet finalized their partnership, despite announcing the deal in February. It also answers questions regarding the release of the first Nokia/Windows Phone device launch. According to the documents, Nokia predicts that the “primary smartphone platform” will take “about two years.”
Special emphasis is placed on the effort to “retain and transition the installed base of approximately 200 million Symbian owners to Nokia Windows Phone smartphones over time.” However, Mary-Jo Foley of ZDNet took a thorough look at the documents and found 101 mentions of “Microsoft.” After I scanned the documents, I found much less mention of “Symbian.”
Other tidbits of information on the new corporate relationship include Microsoft’s responsibility for designing Microsoft Office and other Microsoft productivity apps for Nokia smartphones. We also know that Silverlight will be the developer tool of choice. However, Nokia is expected to “continue to support a Java-based development environment.”
At the end of Foley’s analysis, she concludes that the deal is a lot like Microsoft’s search deal with Yahoo, where Microsoft gets most of what it wants out of the deal without having to buy a company. of the documents, she had an interesting summary of her thoughts on the merger.
I’m inclined to agree that Microsoft has an uncanny way of striking deals heavily in its favor. Despite taking an obscene amount of time to create a smartphone OS that could marginally compete with iOS and Android, the company still managed to market a product that could appeal to longtime mobile giant, Nokia.
2 years will be about 4 years too late.
definitely. Nokia and Windows are now both too far behind to
really compete in the forseeable future.