Originally Posted by tkatchev

Wait, what? Yes, we do know the details. We know that it's a non-exclusive deal, read: the OEM WinPhone will ship without Nokia services. Meaning that Microsoft can choose to use another services provider (HTC, Samsung, Microsoft itself) whenever it chooses.

Originally Posted by tkatchev

No, it's a move to a Nokia that's just experienced a hostile takeover by Microsoft.

Come on, people, I feel dump just discussing this.

Originally Posted by Rugoz

But if Nokia provides key services to the wp7 ecosystem MS cannot easily get rid of them.

Originally Posted by Rugoz

Honestly I still think Symbian/Meego/Qt and OVI services would have been the better option, but I can at least see a logic behind the decision.

Originally Posted by mikec

If Elop was bright about this, he should have dropped S40, push S3 into the lowend now, and disrupt that end of the market, gives good reason for Qt to be strategic, and allows Nokia breathing room to sort Meego, while he is earning a crust with WP7.

Originally Posted by Rugoz

Just reading the engadget live-ticker of the nokia event.

From a business perspective this cooperation makes more sense to me now. Essentially Nokia wants money, money from advertising, similar to google. Nokia will provide location-based services (and others?) which will be used by all OEMs. So Nokia is part of a much bigger ecosystem than it could provide itself.

The target is clearly google, more so than apple.

Originally Posted by ericsson

Except for the fact that S3 will never work on S40 hardware. Smartphones isn't everything, and there are ecosystems building on the S40 platform. S40 sold more than 300 million devices last year.

Originally Posted by zwer

Microsoft can always work in the background on their own implementation of the services they will be temporarily borrowing from Nokia, and then they can just silently push out Nokia without endangering their portfolio. It wouldn't be the first time in Microsoft's history, one can actually say it's their most well known pattern... The only service they'd have a bit trouble replacing would be Maps given Nokia's ownership of Navteq. But then, it's not as if Navteq is the only game in town...

I still fail to see what Nokia gets out of this that is enough important to risk alienating their loyal customers, at least two years of severely lower profits, giving up on the middle portion of their portfolio (WP7 ain't gonna work on 250€ HW, profits included), axing the most used smartphone platform in the world by a large margin, axing arguably the best crossplatform development toolkit from the mobile space, killing of the Ovi service just as it was finally starting to gain some momentum, and essentially putting all their eggs in one basket... All that for a platform with abysmal market share and user interest, severely limited and completely controlled by Microsoft.

Whether WP7 succeeds or not, Microsoft won't suffer, they have a LOT of other sources of revenue and they can always muscle themselves back in the mobile market - they've been doing that for the past decade after destroying one by one mobile-oriented company. However, Nokia risks here a lot, by the time WP7's failure can be perceived they will be blown out of the mobile space and the best they will be able to hope for is the fate of Motorola, with no real platform or viable strategy as a backup. Even if the WP7 endeavor miraculously succeeds, Nokia will be having hard time to push enough devices to the market competing at the same thing with much cheaper manufacturers.

But ok, it's their choice, I guess... I won't be trying to save a company from itself. I'm just concerned what will we (the consumers/developers) be left with in the mobile space governed by a threesome consisting of a glorified virtual machine, walled garden and a flashy feature phone platform - all three of each striving their best to tie you into their individual isles and trying to control how would you use a device you've bought. So far, it doesn't look good...