Mobile World Congress 2011 is coming to a close but there was certainly some big news to come of it. One piece that struck me as most interesting was Nokia’s announcement of it’s release of Windows Phone 7 handsets. In the world of cellular devices Nokia has been dominate in sales of mid-range smartphones and just recently released their Symbian^3 Operating system.
Now it appears they have realized their proprietary OS would not be sufficient in this growing market. Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop stated that “our first priority is beating Android.” Elop did not see Symbian as having the same brand power that Android or the WP7 OS has had and is planning on slowly phasing out Symbian^3 all together.
However, among the excitement of consumers, a large amount of Nokia employees didn’t feel the same energy as they walked out of Nokia’s offices around the world, causing shares to fall by 14 percent, resulting in the largest drop since July 16.
This is going to be a great partnership for both companies, considering Windows Phone 7’s slow start and Nokia’s slow decline in the smartphone world. Despite rumours of the contrary, Nokia will not be the sole manufacturer for Windows Phone devices, Microsoft still wishes to provide consumers with more options.
Although Nokia believe that they will be of huge benefit to Microsoft, they still seem to be thinking about the overall benefit, and what Microsoft are able to contribute to them. “The question is, what’s the contribution from Microsoft. They are contributing services like Bing and Xbox. They also — this is a very important thing to recognize in the balance of the transaction — they are contributing a dependency. They are placing a very significant bet on Nokia for the delivery of the location-based services. But there’s another element that comes out of this: we are also receiving a new source of revenue through advertising.”
