The Right Stuff

The news is out Nokia is buying the remaining 52 percent stake of Symbian for a cool $410 million dollars. It has also committed not to cut jobs and would keep it as a non-for-profit organization.

Consider this 40 percent of the phones sold world over are Nokia. Another huge chunk of market phones are running Symbian operating system including the likes of Motorola, Sony and Ericsson. This acquisition is going to be sending shock waves to each of those cell phone makers. How can you depend for a software that gives your phone all those jazzy features on a competitor who wants to capture your market share?

Follow up:

From Nokia’s point of view its an excellent deal. No more loyalties, not depending on someone else’s software for your phones, safe guard of propriety information, huge savings on their own phones for a lifetime and within a few years it would be an important profit making organization.

Besides this it also gets to customize the software with its own expertise. With Nokia going all out for Symbian and buying this, I see more developers coding on symbian platforms than LiMo, Microsoft or Google’s Android platforms.

It would definitely reduce the cost of the software ownership, Nokia will be providing it with funds and additional Research and Development support, get loyalties from other manufacturers, control the market and decide who gets what features for their phones.

I see another Google in making unless other manufactures decide to increase competition and get their own OS’s and prevent one company from deciding what majority features you and I would use on our handsets.

Overall it is a very sensible buy for Nokia and has tremendous implications for its competitors. Wake up before its too late.