Speaking to people in the US, it appears that almost none of them have ever heard of Nokia’s Ovi platform ‘ in fact very few have heard of Nokia, despite it being the largest handset maker in the world. This is because it is so underwhelming in the US.
And that problem is very much at the heart of last week’s announcement that Yahoo! and Nokia will virtually join at the hip, when it comes to web services on a handset.
Ovi probably offers significantly more content and services than even Apple’s iTunes, given that it will allow access to millions of music tracks, the entire range of N-Gage handset games, the best maps in the world, tons of video, a link to your own PC, has its own social network and a full developers forum that is trying to catch up with Apple on Apps, but is sadly so far lacking. But you need a Nokia phone to use all of that stuff, and even then it has to be one of its fancy N-Series devices to really hum, and even those just aren’t close to being as good as an iPhone or many of the new Androids.
So Nokia and Yahoo! plan to leverage each others’ strengths in e-mail, instant messaging and maps and navigation services, and to put this as much on PCs as on mobile devices.
Despite Nokia’s dominance of handsets, it is known to be lagging in advanced smart phone features, and is as much hurt by Android, as it is by Apple’s innovation. Nokia has spent the past three years talking about, and building web services, but has only managed to find second place or worse in each of these data markets. Even in maps people think first of Google Maps before they think of Nokia’s Navteq, although Navteq is technically speaking way ahead of Google, with more global and comprehensive maps and stronger local search.
So now Nokia will be the exclusive, global provider of Yahoo! maps and navigation services, and that means that wherever Yahoo! has been successful in getting its properties onto phones, it can drag one of Nokia’s strong points with it. It will be branded as ‘powered by Ovi,’ whatever platform it is on.
Yahoo! will now take over handling Nokia’s Ovi Mail and Ovi Chat services which will be branded as ‘Ovi Mail / Ovi Chat powered by Yahoo!
The next step is for Nokia and Yahoo! to work out how to do ID federation between their services ‘ on other words either log into one and you are recognized in the other, or the same passwords will work on both.
We always said that Nokia should buy Yahoo!, but it would have been a massive dilution of its mostly Finnish shareholders, so it was never going to happen.
‘Delivering great user experiences ‘ both online and on your mobile ‘ is what this alliance is all about,’ said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO, Nokia. ‘We’re enabling millions of Yahoo! customers in key markets including North America to discover the unique capabilities that Ovi Maps brings. Similarly, Yahoo!’s online expertise will bring exciting mail and messaging enhancements to millions of Ovi Mail customers across almost every country around the world, many of whom will have their first Internet experience on their mobile.’
For Nokia this means it will be banging on the doors of US citizens with a brand they are familiar with ‘ Yahoo!, and this will in turn widen the reach of Yahoo! across another 300 million phones around the world. It’s a win-win against Google for both of them.
Some of these co-branded service offerings will become available in the second half of 2010, with global availability expected in 2011.
Nokia maps now cover 77 countries in 46 languages, while Yahoo! claims 600 million users of Yahoo!-branded sites per month. We would expect that if this goes well that Yahoo! and Nokia will consider merging other aspects of Ovi into the Yahoo brand such as music and games.