Microsoft threat against Nokia exaggerated

The Inquirer ^ | July 17, 2002 | Tony Dennis

[JameRetief]

Nokia faces much bigger challengers than the Redmond Monster

By Tony Dennis: Wednesday 17 July 2002, 14:28

THAT OLD CHESTNUT that Nokia is frightened by Bill Gates' shadow was trotted out again in today's Financial Times.

The claim is that Microsoft will mutate the handset market so that it resembles the PC industry where margins on hardware are minute while software margins stay high.

Apparently there's a danger that Microsoft could help to commoditise the handset market. Eh? Global handset sales are already around 400 million units compared to 120 million at most for PC sales. Which is the commodity?

More people own a mobile phone than a PC in virtually every first world country outside the USA. No. Nokia faces numerous challenges and a rival o/s is probably the least of its worries.

The INQUIRER had to chortle at the comment from Microsoft's Robbie Ray Wright in the FT who claimed, "We don't want developers to have to write applications twice - both for the PC and [for] the phone."

Oh, really? How does Robbie square that with the admission that its twin versions of CE - Stinger and Rapier - share only around 50 per cent of the same code.

So that's two applications just to cover mobile telephony let alone the desktop? The FT also glosses over the fact that both Samsung and Sendo have yet to launch their much vaunted Rapier products.

A much more ominous comment came today from Motorola which claimed that it, not Nokia, was the premier brand in China. And China is the market where handset sales are rapidly expanding not contracting like Europe.

Plus Chinese handset manufacturers are just itching to take a chunk of this market. Where do you think Sendo phones are made? Right, China. On the software side Nokia is more threatened by the likes of CMG and Logica over MMS (fototext) based messaging software.

Microsoft has yet to make even the tiniest dent in this area even though it has a mobile version of Exchange lined up for the task. The rumours of Nokia's demise are, therefore, greatly exaggerated. µ

[D-fendr]

My cell phone works, no reason to switch to a company that makes lousy software.

[TheEngineer]

The INQUIRER had to chortle at the comment from Microsoft's Robbie Ray Wright in the FT who claimed, "We don't want developers to have to write applications twice - both for the PC and [for] the phone."

This is pure BS. The MS PocketPC platform, from a hardware standpoint, is great. But it lacks enough applications to make it useful.

When people hear this "write-once, run on any MS platform" BS, I hope they don't believe it. Desktop applications do not run on WindowsCE without A LOT of rework... practically a rewrite.

Nokia's new phones run the "symbian" operating system. This operating system is supported by many phone vendors (such as Nokia). This operating system appears to be much more mature and tailored to the phone hardware, and it also seems robust enough to handle the data and networking which is required in 3G phones.

If MS does succeed in producing a phone operating system, though, I hope they tell the hardware manufacturers to put a "ctrl-alt-del" or "reset" button on the phone. I would have already thrown away my PocketPC if it didn't have one.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Well let's see how MS does in the game console arena. I would say if they can't convince game developers as well as users to leave their playstations for xboxes, then I doubt that they can break into what is undoubtedly a harder nut for them to crack, the mobile phone market. The jury is still out as far as game consoles go, but I understand that Sony remains out in front. We'll see.