Nokia ceasing development of its own business mobility solutions, what does this mean?

I was reading a recent post on the Nokia Conversations site about some changes going on at Nokia. The first was the stepping down of Bob Iannucci, CTO of Nokia. And then the big news that Nokia is changing its approach to the enterprise by ceasing to develop or market its own business mobility solutions. I have been using and loving my Nokia E71 device and was worried about future Eseries devices when I heard about this announcement. However, the enterprise press release is still not crystal clear to me because it does state that Nokia will work with Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and others to bring Nokia devices and applications to market so I am not sure what will be changing.

Nokia also stated they will be focusing efforts on their new Nokia Email service. With Nokia serving as the current global leader in mobile devices and their primary market being consumers I do agree that focusing on the consumer market is probably a good strategy. It doesn't seem like the enterprise is really embracing Nokia devices, based on my personal observances, but I would like to see some numbers around the Eseries product line to see if this is true around the world.

So, does this mean we won't see future Nokia Eseries devices? What will be the impact of this announcement and change in focus?

In other Nokia news, we know that they have been buying up and rebranding services the last couple of years and they continue this strategy by acquiring OZ Communications. OZ instant messaging clients are found on my T-Mobile devices and other mobile phones. They provide a client that lets you connect to IM clients and chat via text messaging rather than data plans, which is actually useful for my family since we have an unlimited text messaging family plan and only data enabled on my account.

With this acquisition Nokia will be able to provide easy access to AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo! IM. The press release also states that Nokia will continue to work with existing OEMs and mobile operators so it looks like HTC and other Windows Mobile providers may be paying a bit of money to Nokia in the future.