By the time this post is up, Nokia will have announced its new strategy to go with Windows Phone 7 in some shape or form. With the HP/ Palm marriage consummated, this will leave us with 4 major platforms in the smartphone space (I’m assuming that the two Nokia OS’s will soon be put out of their misery). So here are my thoughts on how this will play out-
- With WinP7 now tied to Nokia, I suspect the other manufacturers will slowly bow out of that platform- one dominant OEM is bad news for smaller OEMs. If that happens, a lot of their joint future depends on how fast Nokia can get competitive WinP7 devices to market.
- HP/Palm will win several awards for the best product brought to market roughly 6 months later than needed to be seriously competitve. There’s something to be said for just getting stuff out the door.
- Android Manufacturers will win the award for worst executed vision- a special commendation to Motorola for Xoom pricing and the Atrix Dock. Android Jalebi launches late December 2011, bringing some much needed Indian representation to the high tech industry.
- The iDevice behemoth will hopefully, at some point, slow down (try the 2:50 mark). More realistically, I suspect they’ll continue to sell millions of devices to people like these. John Gruber will exult on how this shows how truly individualistic humans are.
To summarize, the carriers win as all 4 camps make concessions to get carrier support for their device(s). Apple makes lots of money, Google makes a fair bit on mobile, Microsoft continues to dump money in the general direction and HP makes the most beautiful printers anyone’s ever seen.
The markets responded exactly as I would have expected on the Nokia proposes to Microsoft news. I was pleasantly surprised to read their CEO’s letter – in how self-aware and honest he had been, but even more shocked on why he would choose Microsoft for this alliance to bootstrap Nokia devices. There are ten better reasons for Nokia to move to Android. One, it’s free. Two, it’s got a healthy and growing App ecosystem around it, which is critical in the mobile space.
I mostly agree with your prognosis. I too think Apple will make loads of money, Google will make some – and others will whither away.
So their latest stated reason is that Google wouldn’t let them swap out Goog maps for Ovi maps or something. That seems to me to be like throwing out the baby with the bath water.
In particular, I suspect that the Symbian will avoid moving to win 7. and i’m waiting to see how much development of win7 (in terms of devices to compete with dual core androids and iphone5) there is until nokia releases its first win7 devices. so in short, good luck to both of them, but i’m not holding my breath.