The unveiling of Nokia’s new Booklet 3G is the second piece of news this month to highlight the striking change that has gone on in the relationship between the once implacable enemies from the mobile and PC worlds. For both companies this makes eminent sense – up to a point.
The first development was the agreement to put Microsoft’s Office on Nokia’s handsets (though timing and product details were entirely absent). This involved the tacit admission from Microsoft that its Windows Mobile platform was losing ground. With RIM, Apple and Google making the running, it was time to seed its software on other platforms, even if that meant cozying up to Nokia.
Now comes a complementary move that will see Nokia promote Windows for PCs. This has a similar defensive feel. Nokia’s great strength is its massive distribution through mobile operators around the world. If it doesn’t have a full range of devices to sell – and these days, that means everything from the most basic handset to small laptops – its rivals will have a chance to jam a foot in the door.
Do these moves make sense? Certainly. If you’re acting defensively, who better to align yourself with than the biggest player in town – and that means Nokia in mobile and Microsoft in laptops.
But will they work? Only to a limited extent. Playing defence doesn’t innoculate you against real innovation. For Office, the threat comes from the propensity of mobile users to embrace new styles of working, and their willingness to plug into services in the cloud rather than client apps: they simply may not feel the need to engage with Office on their mobile handsets. For Nokia, the risk is that a new generation of laptop-like machines powered by ARM-based chips from companies like Qualcomm will bring superior battery life and more of the simplicity of handsets to the PC world.
For both Microsoft and Nokia, success ultimately depends on a lot more than just playing solid defence.
