There’s a ton of ink spilling around the interwebs about the Nokia-Microsoft partnership, which is looking a lot more like Microsoft pwning Nokia.
Here are some posts that resonated with me that I recommend reading. I mean really reading, not skimming.
Jason Grigsby (@grigs) of Cloud Four wrote Declaring Platform Bankruptcy: Does it make sense? before the actual announcement. He’s being diplomatic by asking; the answer is no.
Tomi Ahonen (@tomiahonen) a Finn and a former Nokia employee dropped his first take First Analysis of Nokia-Microsoft Alliance – Wow this is good for Microsoft which, in typical Tomi fashion, runs very long, but is worth the read.
And finally, Peter-Paul Koch (@ppk) has a couple posts on the partnership, taking a development approach vs. a strategic and business one.
With the exception of Robert Scoble (@scobleizer), pretty much everything I’ve seen is unabashedly negative; incidentally, I don’t really understand how developers could get excited about building for WP 7, even assuming it is as awesome as advertised. The fact that very few people can actually attest to its awesomeness should tell you all you need to know.
Basically, today’s announcement changed very little for mobile developers. If you’re building a mobile web app, WP 7 is still a no-fly and will be until it gets a modern browser. If you’re building native, you still have steep investments to make to support WP 7, but very few addressable customers, the key point being that no Nokia WP 7 devices were announced. Barring a miracle, it looks like 2012 before those begin to trickle into the market.
I guess, if anything cleared up, it’s that Nokia remains a shaky investment for mobile development.
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