Nokia-Microsoft Deal: Winners and Losers

Nokia agreed to make Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 its primary OS platform today, changing the cell phone landscape in major ways. Who's going to benefit from this, and who's going to lose out? Here are some of our preliminary guesses.

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The Winners

Winner: Microsoft. Microsoft is the big winner here. Windows Phone 7 was a second thought for Samsung and HTC; now it's the number-one platform for the number-one phone maker. If Nokia doesn't completely flub this, Microsoft's OS will now be a huge player in the smartphone market.

Winner: ARM. Nokia momentarily toyed with using Intel's Atom chipsets as the basis for its next generation tablets and MIDs, which would have been powered by MeeGo OS. Windows Phone 7, on the other hand, runs on ARM's chips. ARM's dominance in mobile devices is no longer even slightly threatened.

Winner: Apple. The iPhone killed Symbian. It was a slow death, but even Nokia admits that Symbian is dying because it couldn't keep up with the move towards finger-friendly interfaces incited by the iPhone. This deal validates the thought that Apple sets the agenda in mobile.

Winner: HTC. I think the Nokia/Microsoft deal will drive HTC closer to Google, focusing HTC's plans on making some truly amazing Android-powered phones. In this case, less is more, and I think HTC will rise to the competitive occasion.

The Losers

Loser: LG. LG proclaimed itself a premier Microsoft partner at MWC 2009 when it said it would produce 50 Windows phones by 2012. But the Korean company is suddenly second fiddle to Nokia, who has a tighter and more vital relationship with Microsoft.

Loser: Intel. Intel just can't catch a break in mobile. The MeeGo project was supposed to be another way for Intel to break into the handheld market. Now it's been relegated to a science-fair research project. That platform will never be viable.

Loser: Symbian developers. Symbian's developer base is now doomed to write for an admittedly large, but shrinking platform, and Nokia said it won't adapt the Qt tools for Windows Phone 7. Time to learn Silverlight, folks.

Loser: Nokia. This is a humiliating climbdown for Nokia, which basically admitted that it's been wasting a huge software R&D budget and that its OS engineers are incompetent. It puts Nokia's destiny in hock to a third party, and turns the company into an OEM rather than a platform provider. Nokia could go on to become a successful manufacturer of high-quality hardware. But it will never again dominate the global smartphone market like it once did.