News · 11 Mar 2011 · MTW Editorial Team
Nothing really news breaking here but Mary Joe Foley has uncovered Nokia’s latest 20-F SEC Form which details the Microsoft partnership announced last month ahead of Mobile World Congress. All the information contained in it was basically already known if you watched the full webcast of the February 11th event. But the emphasis here is really put on the fact that, just like any big business partnership, this is going to be a long journey. Nokia may (or may not) start shipping its first Windows Phone 7 handset at the end of the year but the full transition is going to spread out until 2013.
Stephen Elop made it very clear that 2011 and 2012 are going to be transitional years for the company who has yet to finalized the deal with Microsoft. I personally think that Microsft (and Ballmer) did, in a sense, really overtake Nokia without outright buying it. The Software giant essentially gets most of the Finnish company’s assets like in exchange of practically nothing (besides the $1 billion):
“Nokia would bring assets such as its brand, hardware, productization, global reach, application store, operator billing support, maps and location-based assets to the partnership. Microsoft would bring their next generation smartphone platform with Windows Phone, as well as search, broader advertising, ecommerce, gaming and productivity assets such as Bing, AdCenter, Xbox Live and Office.”
As you can see, most the Microsoft assets quote above (Bing,Office, Xbox Live etc) are basically already part of the Windows Phone 7 license that Nokia is going to pay for, while those of Nokia are essentially stuff that Microsoft will be able to use and integrate in all of it’s software portfolio. There’s a long road ahead for both companies and execution is what is going key to the success of this partnership. Missteps like the current update status of the OS and the recurrent bugs that have yet to be fixed are surely troubling so let’s hope that Microsoft can pull its head out of the water with the help of Nokia in the coming months.
source: Nokia via Mary Jo Foley
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