Microsoft and Nokia Deal: Opportunity For Developers

An uphill battle for Nokia

Al Hilwa, an analyst at IDC, sees a bleak forecast for Nokia’s Symbian side of things. “The Qt ecosystem for smartphones was in the very early stages,” Hilwa said.

“Nokia had an uphill battle to get that to be a major player in the new touch world. I still think it is better to have mobile platforms that run multiple frameworks in a given mobile ecosystem, but this particular partnership looks focused on building Windows Phone 7 as we know it today on top of Nokia hardware.”

“They likely have no time to prioritise bringing Qt to Windows Phone 7, given the velocity this market is moving at. In the long run, it would be a good idea. I don’t see Java as coming to the Windows Phone 7, however. So the risk is that Nokia may stand to lose the Symbian developer base. However, clearly, that was not working for them anywhere in terms of taking them to the next level, so they had to throw Symbian off of the burning platform.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Bencke spells out the opportunity for developers, saying the partnership with Nokia can dramatically increase the customer base for Windows Phones and, by extension, Windows Phone applications and games.

“This equates to both a larger and more localised consumer market for apps and games on handsets, as well as an acceleration of innovation in back-end services and core infrastructure,” he said.

Moreover, Nokia already has strong relationships with operators in more than 190 markets and manages an application marketplace that delivers four million downloads per day, Bencke said.

Add to that the Windows Phone developer community, which can boast more than 8,000 applications and games, 28,000 registered developers and more than a million tools downloaded, he said.

Two things to keep in mind

Brust said he sees two things developers should keep in mind. One is that “Stephen Elop is now Nokia’s CEO, and he’s working hard on changing things. So Nokia’s past malaise is not a definitive predictor if its future prowess.” The other is that Windows Phone “will now be pushed through two outlets: the Nokia channel, whose model is somewhat Apple-like in its brand, presence and power; and WP7 continues its push through the multi-OEM channel, which is Google’s current model.  That opens the war on two fronts, and that’s a big deal.”

Bencke says Microsoft’s mobile developer ecosystem has become one of the company’s strongest assets and this opportunity with Nokia will only bolster that. “The stage on which you can shine just got bigger,” said Bencke.

For his part, Brust said he sees even more specific opportunities for Microsoft/Nokia to compete against the likes of Google and Apple.

“I’m mindful of current Google-ite and ex-blue badge Vic Gundotra’s now infamous ‘two turkeys don’t make an eagle’ tweet,” Brust said. “But I’m also mindful of one pertinent example of where he’d be wrong: Bing + Yahoo have now created serious competition, both technically and market-share-wise, for Google’s search engine. With that in mind, I think it’s certainly feasible for WP7 + Nokia to challenge Google’s Android platform in a credible way, if not in a threatening one. And, yes, a challenge to the aging iOS platform, too.”