Why Nokia will probably ditch MeeGo for Windows Phone 7

Unless American analysts and journalists are having a laugh, tomorrow will certainly see Nokia announcing a tie-in with Microsoft to put Windows Phone 7 on some of its handsets.

According to The Wall Street Journal and other credible outlets, new Nokia chief Stephen Elop (late of Microsoft) will announce the deal on Friday at an investor event. In his already-infamous "burning platform" memo, which was leaked to the press this week, Elop said Friday would be the day on which Nokia adopted a new strategy that will represent "a huge effort to transform our company".

First, let's recap on Elop's assessment of the various options out there, as stated in that memo:

Symbian: It has proven to be non-competitive in leading markets like North America. Additionally, Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements, leading to slowness in product development and also creating a disadvantage when we seek to take advantage of new hardware platforms. As a result, if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further and further ahead.

MeeGo: We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.

And, also on MeeGo, from an interview with the WSJ published today: For it to be a valid ecosystem, that also implies other (phone makers), our competitors, would be attracted to it as well. That's one of the things that give it critical mass and credibility.

From the same piece, on Android: The combination of Android's existing market share plus the market share that Nokia could bring to the Android ecosystem is a very large number and would signal a very substantial shift in the dynamics of the mobile operating system market.

Finally but crucially, on Windows Phone 7: Windows Phone is in its early formative stages in terms of getting customer traction and so forth. It's a beautiful product and I say that as as someone who is competing with it.

Based on those snippets, I'd say Android's a more likely bet, but let's look at the case for it being Windows Phone 7. Briefly, Elop is ex-Microsoft, and the two companies already have a major tie-in on the office productivity side of things. Case against: Windows Phone 7 remains fairly unproven (but not as unproven as the non-existent MeeGo).

What I don't think is that Nokia will dump Symbian (the announcement is hours away so I could be proved wrong, but such are the perils of my profession). Symbian was, until very recently, the top smartphone platform in the world. It's only been overtaken by Android, which is not tied to any one manufacturer. Nokia shipped 28.3 million Symbian phones in the fourth quarter of 2010; Apple shipped 16.2 million iPhones.

You don't ditch a market leader because its future looks troubled, while it's still the market leader.

I do think that Nokia will withdraw its participation in the MeeGo project, leaving that OS purely to Intel and the Linux Foundation. Elop knows that other manufacturers will never pick up MeeGo (why would they?) so his words strongly indicate the end for a pretty cool project.

Nokia may also drop Series 40, strip Symbian down and make that Nokia's new lower-end OS. S40 is hugely popular, but even the low end of the market wants some smartphone capabilities now. So, this time tomorrow we're likely to be looking at Symbian plus something else. All the geeks in the room want that something else to be Android (please, smartphone gods, we beseech thee) but it does now look like it'll be Windows Phone 7.

Will that help Nokia? It's guaranteed to help it more than MeeGo would, because it doesn't mean starting from scratch. But, in the long term, Nokia will just have to adjust to the fact that it no longer owns the smartphone market, and come up with some new, clever way to differentiate itself from HTC, Samsung and the rest.