| famousringo said: 1. That's actually a mark against WP7. MS doesn't need Nokia for its platform to succeed. What happens if Nokia hooks up to the WP7 train, but Samsung undercuts them on price and becomes the premiere manufacturer? How long will the special treatment last in that scenario? WP7 isn't turning the market on its head without Nokia. If it can transform the market with Nokia's help, why can't Nokia do it on their own? 2. Last I looked, the Ovi Store is still pretty far ahead of WP7 in app sales, and I could be mistaken, but I think MeeGo fully supports it. In fact, the last I saw, Ovi was actually larger than the Android market: http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/21/861-5-percent-growth-android-puny/ This is a few months old, and WP7 was too young to get good data on, but I've heard no reason to believe that WP7's ecosystem is more vibrant than any of the app markets listed in that article. I'm also not convinced that Microsoft is a bigger name in cell phones than Nokia. 3. That's a reason to choose WP7 over Android, but it's not a reason to choose WP7 over MeeGo, which Nokia has even more freedom to modify than WP7. There's room for disagreement here, but as far as I'm conerned, Nokia without its own software is a lot like Sega without its own hardware. It's dancing to somebody else's tune, and for somebody else's gain. There's no question that Nokia needed to do something to escape their downward spiral, but if MeeGo really is as good as it looks, I'm not convinced that wedding themselves to Microsoft was the best answer. |
Just to be clear, while I do think there are some valid reasons for choosing WP7, if MeeGo is as good as it looks to be, then I probably would have given MeeGo a much higher priority. Anyway,
1) I agree that it gives Nokia more competition, for better or worse, but I think there are other substantial factors that makes it a good choice rather than a bad one.
First of all, the burden of making and keeping the eco system successful is not Nokia's alone (from a manufacturer standpoint), because you have several other manufacturers interested in seeing WP7 succeed. If WP7 is successful, manufacturers are given more choice between smartphone OSs, because Android will recieve good competition.
Had they chosen to support MeeGo instead, then that could have been the one they were all betting on this year, but it's not.
Secondly, Nokia has a small presence in the US, and having other manufacturers who stand stronger in that market will benefit the eco system, while increasing awareness of WP7, something that might help Nokia gain marketshare in the US if they can produce some good and unique phones.
2) I believe you're correct that MeeGo can run legacy apps, but we don't know how this will be handled. I can't quite tell if your data includes ad revenue though, but it seems to me that it doesn't. I do think the picture looks different if you take ad revenue into account, but the best data I can find only uses one ad network. However, in this data (from may), iOS and Android are evenly matched on revenue with very little to difference between WP7 and Symbian. In ad impressions however, Symbian holds a 2% marketshare against WP7's 1%, which is hardly anything to brag about, but WP7 did have a 92% growth month over month between april and may.
Nokia has also said that their partnership with Microsoft allows them much greater entry into mobile ads, so maybe the developer support isn't such a big reason as opposed to increased ad revenue, which could tie into all WP7 handsets and not just Nokia's own.
EDIT: And in response to the marketing, I agree that Nokia probably has a bigger brand in the mobile space in general, but they're never really associated with smartphones. While Windows isn't the biggest brand in smartphones either, I'd say it's bigger than Nokia's, especially for enterprise smartphones.
3) Agreed, but the deal with Microsoft gives several other advantages that apparently give WP7 an edge of MeeGo in Nokia's eyes.
