Why Nokia & Microsoft's Alliance Can Only Be A Good Thing

There's been alot of Internet chatter recently about the proposed merge of Nokia and Microsoft in the mobile smartphone space. Particular venom has come from the existing Qt and Symbian developer communities, who are pretty much seeing their programming skills and environments being tossed away in favor of Win Phone 7. While this anger is very much understandable, in my opinion this merge can only be good for MS and Nokia in the long run and the industry as a whole.

Here's why:

 1) Microsoft is rubbish at hardware - all their attempts so far to bust into the electronics market have been piddling at best. However their new mobile platform in Windows Phone 7 has been getting rave reviews and is generally well received by everyone that has used it. Nokia is great at hardware (no other manufacturer I can think of comes close in terms of camera quality in particular) but of recent years has struggled with its software division. The Nokia N8 was a phone with great hardware but awful software and user experience.

2) There is currently around 5 million plus .NET developers worldwide. That's 5 million people in the MS community who have so far been burdened with a poor mobile platform (Windows CE, Win Mobile 5 & 6) or more recently a great platform with no market reach (Windows Phone 7). A deal with Nokia could finally see large mobile development take-up by that community who would not only have a decent mobile OS to develop against but a potentially large market to sell to.

3) As a new developer, the Nokia software environment is too complicated, disconnected and difficult to understand. There's too many languages and platforms (Qt, MeeGo, Symbian) and just too many devices all with differing specs, resolutions and capabilities. In other words, too much choice. Apple has clearly shown what kind of new developer take up you can get when you pare things back and simplify.

There is of course a catch - these two slow moving giants are going to have to work together closely and efficiently to deliver on their promises, and most importantly - innovate. We've already seen in the Android world what happens when manufacturers fail to deliver on software upgrades in their handsets and both Nokia and Microsoft will be responsible for ensuring timely, snappy updates and feature delivery.



Write a comment

  • Required fields are marked with *.


If you have trouble reading the code, click on the code itself to generate a new random code.
 

Max
Posts: 1
Comment
Re:
Reply #1 on : Mon February 14, 2011, 22:19:31
Though it might be a pain for those Symbian developers. If they chose to move over to .net they have will gain a broader set of skills.