With Symbian still the largest mobile operating system in the world (as Nokia’s preferred Operating System), it came as a surprise to many that Microsoft and Nokia announced a shared mobile future agreement on February 11, which will see Symbian reduced to a sliver of the market share it currently holds.
Nokia has agreed to have Microsoft’s Windows Phone as its primary mobile operating system, with the ability to modify on top of the platform in the fields they perform well in such as imaging. Nokia will be a primary hardware manufacturer for Windows Phones, helping the two companies tackle Apple, Google and RIM for smartphone dominance. Microsoft’s Bing search service will power Nokia devices in exchange for Nokia Maps to power Microsoft’s mapping service, and Nokia’s content store will be integrated with the Microsoft Marketplace to further converge the two companies’ product and service lines.
The deal has many Symbian users threatening to boycott future Nokia phones, frustrated because of how easily Nokia appears ready to abandon Symbian. In particular, they point to a slide Nokia CEO Stephen Elop presented at its Capital Markets Day which shows Symbian slowly losing market share and Windows Phone taking what it once had. While low-end phones in developing markets and feature phones (the kinds of phones most of us have or used to have before smartphones) will have Symbian on them for the foreseeable future, Nokia smartphones will almost assuredly have only Windows Phone on them and it’s only a matter of time before Windows Phone is compact enough to be pushed down to the lower ends of the market, or feature phones lose popularity. Nokia is said to be hoping to move the 200 million Symbian users to Windows Phone by the end of the transition.
Symbian fans with good foresight should have prepared for this for months now, as this is just another step towards the end for Symbian as Motorola, Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson have either shifted to development for Android or simply stated they are no longer using Symbian. Symbian has had trouble keeping its market dominance for a while, dropping their market share dramatically from 2006. Nokia stopped development of Symbian^4 in October, pushing all updates to its current Symbian^3 system, already raising eyebrows then about its commitment to the platform.
The agreement raises questions not only about Symbian but Nokia’s other mobile operating system, MeeGo, which it was developing with Intel. While Nokia hasn’t pulled out of the MeeGo project, their MeeGo team manager left and their close relationship with Microsoft puts their commitment to MeeGo in question. The future of their MeeGo support seems stronger than its support for Symbian, since Nokia has given developers and engineers on their first MeeGo handset, the N950, bonuses and raises to keep the project going, which is likely to be the MeeGo product Nokia is committed to releasing this year in their press release for the agreement. Nokia could also be holding onto MeeGo support in case it decides to build a tablet or netbook, as MeeGo is designed for all sub-laptop devices, and Windows Phone 7 doesn’t support those and doesn’t seem to be on Microsoft’s radar for tablets in the near future.
Nokia’s support for Windows Phone may seem misguided, as Microsoft has been having trouble getting the operating system to stabilize. In a recent update at the end of February, 10% of Windows Phone 7 users were unable to update their phone correctly, leaving the phones from moderately faulty to completely unusable. Not only was this update damaging to many phones, it was also Microsoft’s first update for the system that came out last November; around four months before. If Nokia wants to depend on Windows Phone to such a high degree, Microsoft had best provide more frequent and stable updates to mature the system so it is comparable in stability and features to its main competitors.
The focus on Windows Phone may be a good move for Nokia in the end, but in Finland it’s hitting hard as nearly 1500 employees who had previously worked on Symbian walked out when hearing about the deal, realizing they’d be losing their jobs soon as Nokia has been shutting off support for various foundations and organizations for Symbian over the last year. If Nokia benefits from this deal it could end up hiring more people specifically in hardware or apps, so it remains to be seen how well this turns out for Finland. As for us in North America, if all goes well for Nokia and Microsoft, you may be seeing more Nokia phones on the street than you do now, joining those iPhones, Androids, and BlackBerries that dominate the mobile ecosystem here today.
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