Nokia goes backwards

Techcrunch reports that Microsoft will take over Nokia's handset manufacturing. Hard to see how that will end well, given Microsoft's track record on hardware. It is very odd to me that people think the Nokia brand can survive being run by Microsoft. The brand has a reputation for quality because Nokia made good phones, not because of a Job's-esque reality distortion field.

Mashable on the pros and cons.

Microsoft, Windows Phone and Nokia

Microsoft continues it's downward drift, wasting billions on poorly conceived, non-strategic online efforts while Apple eats its Personal Computing lunch with the iPad. Meanwhile Nokia's partnership with Microsoft Windows Phone looks increasingly doomed. I can't understand how a company that thrived on low-end phones could choose an expensive, untried mobile OS that requires the highest end hardware and plan to compete with Chinese manufacturers using a free OS that is known for running well on low-end hardware.

IDC and Gartner claim that Apple will drop behind Windows Phone in market share by 2015, but the signs I see suggest that Microsoft continues to make the same technical and policy mistakes it always has in mobile. Microsoft's proprietary developer efforts can't compete against a well funded, open and vibrant Android community, and their OS sucks compared to the Unix derived iOS and Android. There is no virtuous cycle of open development and user network effects for them to exploit, as they did with Windows. The desktop development models of Microsoft's ISVs don't translate to networked mobile platforms any better than they translated to the web. Apple on phones and tablets has the same advantages it maintained in it's desktop niche, obsessive control of all aspects of the user experience, software and hardware. Microsoft tried to split the difference with Windows Phone, ending up with nothing.