Now that some time has passed since the MS/Nokia announcement I have had time to reflect on what was said. The central message from them was it is not about devices but now all about ecosystems. While apps and content are very important I can’t help but think that this is yesterday’s battle.
Take a look at the products that were introduced around this year’s CES and MWC. It seems to me that the new battle is all about having a unified smart phone/tablet platform. Look at the smart phone/tablets from Apple, HP, RIMM, and Android. This MS/Nokia alliance does not even have a tablet strategy, unbelievable.
What I find really interesting is that this was the very strategy that Nokia and Intel announced around last year’s MWC. I think that they got it correct and were clearly shooting ahead of the duck. Is Nokia that bloated of a company that they just cannot move forward? Did they just panic and decide to give up too soon? It is hard for me to think that they could have not announced a Meego smart phone and tablet this year at MWC. Even if it was not totally completed it would have bought Nokia valuable time and kept them in the game. That’s what RIMM did with the Playbook, it worked for them…

Steve

I think an alliance with Google to use their cloud services on top of Meego would have been a lot more palatable for everyone and a lot more successful.

By the way, where I work, we use Google Apps Premier Edition for our business mail and calendaring. We, do use their other apps lightly. I have given Android phones to the senior partners and have encouraged other employees to go that route as well. It is working great. I have been able to use it just fine through Microb, but it is nice to have something like Android for the less techy users.

Someone should integrate Google services with Meego now! That would be the best of both worlds. Tight easy peasy online apps for the masses, and the power of Linux, Qt, and open source for the geeks and developers.

It's unfathomable if they don't have a tablet strategy being brewed.

Could it be that.... MS sealed this deal with Nokia by sharing MS Courier for a future Nokia product? (on top of Billions of dollars in upfront investments... which they hope to collect back in future royalties and strategic market positions)

Thats really stretching it. There isn't a shred of proof to support that. Awesome though the idea may be, the ultimate Microsoft tablet strategy will be Windows 8. WIth its new UI and ARM support, as well as an emphasis on web-based programming, it will be Microsoft's assault on the tablet market.

How well it will do, I am skeptical, but not pessimistic. Where it leaves Nokia? Who knows.

Win 8 is at least 2 years away isn't it?

I don't doubt that it's somewhere in their future; but the big tablet fight is in 2011.

Hell, MeeGo is ahead of unified-tablet-phone by originally aiming at unified-all-devices (car "infotaiment", phones, tablets, etc). I think them failing to make it better from there is the result of panic. Not conventional panic, of course, but like I said in other posts: the "panic" of execs who don't understand the potential of open source nor that of the MeeGo ecosystem they were producing. So they cling to what they do understand, which is that iOS and Android succeeded recently partly/largely/entirely because of app ecosystems.

Both Nokia's and MS problem has been their schizophrenia and lack of focus. It makes attracting good developers, both as hires, and outside the company, very hard, these people are the lifeblood of an ecosystems, and both MS and Nokia are bad at supporting ecosystems in this regard.

MS gets away with it through shear inertia, Nokia got away with it, because their competitors were, for awhile, just as bad as them at supporting ecosystems.

The only future chance in mobile for MS and Nokia, now that they have made their bed, is to make sure they lie in it, otherwise no one will be interested, as it will be solid proof of both companies inherent and unfixable dithering feckless operation.

Some of my thoughts: http://tabulacrypticum.wordpress.com...he-rest-of-us/

WP8 is also when multi-core-CPU-support is expected.
Nokia has to wait that long to get their first dual-core CPU mobile phone out. All high end phones published in Barcelona WMC had dual-core-app-CPUs.

Nokia will be alot smaller, if barely alive, when they can release their first high end WP phone.