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Intel and Nokia seemed to be great friends before the MicroKia marriage took place. They were working together to create MeeGo which was supposed to be their joint mobile and tablet OS. Paul Otellini, the long time Intel CEO, feels that Nokia went with Microsoft for purely financial reasons and not because the platform was the best option available.
He says if Nokia was going to leave MeeGo development, which is something he obviously did not want, then they should have gone with Google and Android. MeeGo was created last year by the merger of Nokia and Intel’s Linux-based platforms Maemo and Moblin. Intel has now been left to push the mobile platform alone, and for obvious reasons they are still eager to get into the mobile space.
Otellini feels that Nokia didn’t have the money to continue with MeeGo development, at least until the platform was more viable. Nokia will have the same problems other manufacturers have stated for not choosing Windows Phone 7, and that is not being able to differentiate their offerings. He is quoted on the differentiation issue as saying, “It would have been less hard on Android, on MeeGo he could have done it.”
The Microsoft deal with Nokia has numerous and substantial financial rewards incorporated within in it. Though it was not a straight-out purchase the number is said to be in the billions. Clearly Nokia’s CEO Elop was seeing $$$ when he agreed to devote Nokia to the Windows platform. Microsoft is very aware that the mobile space is the future of computing and is willing to spare no expense to make sure they are a major player.
Google and Nokia overlapped in a key area which hampered them ever making such a deal. Google Maps is obviously a major piece to the Android ecosystem and Nokia’s Navteq maps is their last real major software product. While Google would have simply let Navteq maps die and be replaced by their version, Microsoft is going to merge Navteq with their own mapping product and integrate it within the Windows Phone OS.
A lot of people have opinions on this deal and most of them aren’t positive, but with a deal with money in the billions changing hands most of us would have done the same thing. Do you think they will be successful?
Source: Fortune