ANTenna Blog -- Mobile

Would Microsoft really dump Windows Mobile in favor of an open-source competitor? For all practical purposes, that is exactly what happened this week.

InformationWeek has the story on yesterday's deal between Microsoft and Nokia:

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s mobile alliance with Finnish smartphone maker Nokia (NYSE: NOK), while boosting Redmond's ability to compete in the corporate market, could ultimately sound the death knell for the Windows Mobile portable operating system, according to an analyst at influential research firm Gartner.

Under the deal, announced Wednesday, Microsoft will port the mobile version of its Office suite to Nokia's Symbian operating system, leaving Windows Mobile out in the cold.

Why would Microsoft throw Windows Mobile under a bus? Redmond has invested a fortune developing and marketing WinMo, yet it remains stuck firmly in third place behind Blackberry and Symbian.

With Apple's iPhone OS and Linux both pushing double-digit market share, WinMo could easily wind up in sixth place within the next year or two.

That's better than Palm, currently locked in a slugfest with "Other" for last place. But not much better.

The InformationWeek article, however, omits a very interesting point about the Microsoft-Nokia deal. Last year, Nokia turned over Symbian to an independent foundation that will release the entire OS under an open-source license. The first Symbian Foundation release, a security software package, appeared early last month.

By 2010, the entire Symbian OS will be open-source software.

How will Microsoft spin its embrace of an open-source mobile OS at the expense of Windows Mobile? What will the Symbian developer community -- or the Linux developer community, for that matter -- make of the deal?

I'll hazard a guess on the first question, at least. With new versions of Office Mobile and Windows Mobile still in the pipeline, Microsoft is unlikely to acknowledge that WinMo is a lame duck.

Some folks don't see anything more than a garden-variety business deal happening here. That's flat-out wrong: A platform is only as valuable as its application support. By making Office Mobile available on a competing mobile OS -- the world's leading mobile OS -- Microsoft is undermining its ability to position WinMo as anything more than an afterthought.

If you're itching to buy that hot new WinMo smartphone, go for it. Just don't act surprised when the next version of Windows Mobile turns out to be the last.