There were two bullet points in the announcement of the partnership between Microsoft and Nokia this morning that stood out to me as being not like the others:
Bing would power Nokia's search services across Nokia devices and services, giving customers access to Bing's next generation search capabilities.
Nokia Maps would be a core part of Microsoft's mapping services. For example, Maps would be integrated with Microsoft's Bing search engine.
Now, there is plenty of talk about how the partnership helps Microsoft more than Nokia, why Nokia screwed up choosing a mobile platform that costs money over a free Android model, how this is or isn't going to help Windows Phone worldwide, and how it is or isn't going to help Nokia get back into the U.S. mobile market.
But all this is focused on the mobile realm, which I don't particularly think is much affected by this partnership in the short term. But an interesting viewpoint surfaced at work today: what if the partnership wasn't as much about mobile as the companies would have you believe?
One of Microsoft's great crusades is to dent Google's market share as a search leader. The Bing integration with Nokia opens up a new mobile realm to Microsoft's search efforts and puts Bing in a competitive spot in a mobile space Google is trying to dominate.
What else does Nokia have to trade? Better and cheaper map data. Nokia's 2007 acquisition of Navteq for $8.1 billion was the largest acquisition in the company's history. It fought Google for the privilege and forming a strategic partnership with that company would have admitted a gross misallocation of resources on Nokia's part.
Nokia also faces a bigger threat from Google than it does Apple. They obviously believed so when acting to buy Navteq. Now, the low-margin Android phones are destroying Nokia's established user base in feature phones, where it will no longer able to compete with an outdated Symbian.
Microsoft gets map data and an extended market share for Bing, Nokia takes a slice of search revenue it didn't have to develop, salvages something out of their enormous takeover three years back, and sticks it to the company they fear the most right now. What if the partnership's as much about search and data as it is mobile?