Half of press day we spent waiting in anticipation for the big announcement from Nokia and Microsoft, but when it came it was not really in our media and entertainment markets. Prior co-operation between the two has been, over things like bringing the Microsoft PlayReady DRM to Nokia platforms, so we had high hopes. In the end it is an important deal, but mostly to the enterprise market, with the Microsoft Office suite to be offered on Symbian Nokia devices.
This is a core reflection that Nokia sees Microsoft as mostly toothless, no longer the monster that it was painted as by its previous CEO, while Google and perhaps Apple are the companies to fear. And on the basis that if you are my enemy’s enemy, you must be a friend, the two have paired up.
It has been widely known for some time that Microsoft was working on web based versions of Office, for devices which have less power at their disposal and these may well turn out to be the same, or at least similar code bases to the Nokia versions.
In a way we have been clamouring for this type of move for years and have told Microsoft to stop going on about how the familiarity of Windows on the phone makes it easy to train enterprise staff. There needs to be application compatibility ‘ we need to open a word document and be able to email to someone on a PC, from out phones ‘ but we don’t need Windows to do that.
The same applies to Powerpoint presentations, Instant Messaging and such, and Microsoft seems to have overcome its reluctance to develop applications for other platforms, otherwise it was in danger of being frozen out of mobile by Android office apps.
The two will form a global alliance to design, develop and market what they are calling mobile productivity solutions and will begin collaborating immediately on the design, development and marketing of these for the mobile professional, bringing Microsoft Office Mobile and Microsoft business communications, collaboration and device management software to Nokia’s Symbian devices. Note because it is Symbian and only Symbian this is important for a number of reasons.
We suspect that this announcement has been brought forward rapidly, and used as a way of commenting on the stupid rumours that Nokia was about to dump Symbian. We have to realize that the German Financial Times which ‘broke’ that story, simply misunderstood what it was told. Symbian may not be Nokia’s only platform, and while it is unlikely to ever endorse Android, it has both Series 40 (the development environment for its non-smartphones) and Maemo (its Linux version for tablets) and it may have other platforms that it experiments with internally, just in case they become irresistible in the market. But none of that means it’s dumping Symbian. So this announcement says ‘Look, would we do this if we were dumping Symbian?’
The other issue is that Microsoft has declared that it would never truck with Linux, but of course it will and it has, but it always puts it to the back of the queue. So Microsoft Office won’t come out any day soon on Maemo with Nokia, but never say never.
First up is Nokia’s E series, it’s enterprise phones, some of which (E71, E72) have great similarities with Blackberry style phones and already have good integration with corporate email using Exchange ActiveSync. Later other Nokia Smartphones will get these features.
It appears to us that Nokia’s long term partnership with IBM on enterprise mobility, one that has been successful, is really the injured party here and Microsoft may now take IBM’s place as the preferred partner, now that it is happy to work outside of Windows only. And don’t let’s start the obvious next rumour, that Nokia will come out with Windows Mobile phones ‘ it is no more likely to do that than offer Android. What’s the point of fighting Microsoft to a standstill in the mobile market, only to turn around and throw in the towel after it has won that particular battle.
“With more than 200 million smartphone customers globally, Nokia is the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer and a natural partner for us,” said Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop. “Today’s announcement will enable us to expand Microsoft Office Mobile to Nokia smartphone owners worldwide and allow them to collaborate on Office documents from anywhere, as part of our strategy to provide the best productivity experience across the PC, phone and browser.”
In fact this is the ONLY sensible thing for Microsoft to have done. It cannot defend Word, Excel and Powerpoint on the mobile, purely from within Windows. It has them on Apple platforms, including the iPhone. It doesn’t want them on Android, or it may, but only as browser applications, and there is no other single phone population anywhere near as big as Symbian.
Next year, Nokia intends to start shipping Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile on its smartphones, followed by other Office applications and related software and services in the future. These will include the ability to view, edit, create and share Office documents on Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft OneNote, as well as use enterprise instant messaging and presence, and offer mobile access to intranets which built using Microsoft SharePoint Server on the native Nokia browser. The system will even offer a way to control Microsoft enterprises devices with an interface to Microsoft System Center ‘ just right for all those IT executives,
Office Communicator also opens the door to multi-party audio, video and desktop sharing and collaboration on documents, enterprise video conferencing, as well as setting phone alerts, automatic call forwarding and re-routing incoming calls to voice mail. Some of this overlaps with existing Ovi Share capabilities, and it will be interesting to see if Nokia truncates Office Communicator somewhat to keep Ovi center stage.
Finally this will almost certainly make Symbian very attractive to other handset vendors, but almost certainly at the expense of using Windows Mobile ‘ something that many of them (think Sony Ericsson and Xperia) have already burnt their hands on recently and are starting once again to turn their back on, despite a brief resurgence.
The one worry in all this is what the cost of Symbian Office will be. If it arrives bundled as a trial on the phone, and the consumer has to shell out direct to Microsoft for the privilege, it will be a disaster. However knowing Microsoft’s closeness to operators, and with Nokia’s help, all software costs may well be bundled into the device price or operator contract, and just like the iPhone, drive data revenue. Done like that it might be a great success.