Nokia and the Inexplicable Surrender to Microsoft

There is an unanswered question that surrounds the recent announcement of the strategic alliance between Microsoft and Nokia that in my opinion deserves to be highlighted with a hint of malice.

Nokia is the largest mobile handset manufacturer in the world and it holds a market share of 31% on a global scale. Stephen Elop, the current CEO of the company, has announced a partnership agreement with Microsoft a few days ago, aimed at creating a new “global mobile ecosystem” based on new Nokia devices that will house Windows Phone 7 operating system, in order to face the relentless advance of Apple and Google in the mobile phone industry.

Stephen Elop, for those of you who don’t know yet, comes straight from Microsoft Business Division where he was responsible Microsoft Office product line until September 2010.

The Symbian operating system is the heart of the current Nokia smartphones. According to estimates by Gartner, dated September 2010, the percentage of mobile devices running Symbian was, for that period, around the 40.1% of the entire market. The new agreement will erase Symbian from the equation in favor of the adoption of Windows Phone 7 in Nokia smartphones.

After the flop of the Windows Mobile operating system and the embarrassing failure of Kin (the smartphone Microsoft announced with much fanfare and discontinued just days after its US release), the Redmond company has concentrated all of its efforts on Windows Phone 7 as a chance to regain ground on the technological divide accumulated over these years from the competitors in the industry. The results weren’t as successful as expected, and Microsoft then tried a clever move, perhaps the last available.

By “sheer luck” one of its former executives ended up in the mobile giant from Northern Europe. By pure chance Microsoft has teamed up with Nokia. Nokia, with Elop’s push, sacrificed Symbian. He cleared his competitive edge against Microsoft. Microsoft has removed a competitor from the race and won, in a “forced” way, that huge market share of the smartphone operating systems (Symbian’s), unaccessible until then.

More than strategic alliance, that of Nokia sounds like an inexplicable surrender to Microsoft. And maybe someone, sooner or later, will have to justify it (Source from : Woork)