Google rivals
continue to voice their reservations about the search-engine giant’s $12.5
billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility.
“If I happened
to be someone who was an Android manufacturer or an operator, or anyone with a
stake in that environment,” Nokia CEO Stephen Elop (a former Microsoft
executive) told a crowd in Helsinki, according to Reuters Aug. 17, “I would be picking up my phone
and calling certain executives at Google and say, ‘I see signs of danger
ahead.’”
Elop also used
Google’s acquisition to justify his own decision earlier this year to side
Nokia with Microsoft’s Windows Phone over Android. He said, “The very first
reaction I had was very clearly the importance of the third ecosystem and the
importance of the partnership we announced on Feb. 11; it is more clear than
ever before.”
Unsurprisingly,
Elop’s comments echo those of Microsoft’s Windows Phone Division President Andy
Lees, who wrote in a widely circulated Aug. 15 statement that “investing in a
broad and truly open mobile ecosystem is important for the industry and
consumers alike, and Windows Phone is now the only platform that does so with
equal opportunity for all partners.”
Indeed, it
seems that Microsoft’s early strategy against the Google-Motorola deal is to
try to peel away Google’s hardware partners, who could be upset over Motorola’s
new position as the favored child.
“The likes of
Samsung, HTC and LG obviously don’t have any other choice than to say at this
point that they welcome the deal,” Florian Mueller, an intellectual property
analyst, wrote in an Aug. 15 posting on his blog. “But there’s no
way that they can compete with a Google-owned Motorola Mobility on a level
playing field.”
That could
drive those manufacturers into taking another look at Windows Phone. “Forrester
can hear [Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer] and company pitching the Asian players
on how Microsoft is the only hardware-agnostic player left,” John McCarthy, an
analyst with Forrester, wrote in an Aug. 15 corporate blog posting, “and that HTC,
Samsung and LG should increase their support for [Microsoft smartphones] as
protection against Google.”
Strengthened
manufacturing partnerships could certainly help Windows Phone. Microsoft’s
smartphone share stood at 1.6 percent for the second quarter of 2011, according
to research firm Gartner, down from 4.9 percent a year ago. That compares with
Google Android with 43.4 percent, Nokia’s Symbian with 22.1 percent, Apple iOS
with 18.2 percent, RIM’s BlackBerry franchise with 11.7 percent, and Bada—a
mobile OS developed by Samsung—with 1.9 percent.
Microsoft
hopes to further counter the competitive pressures of Android and iOS with its
upcoming “Mango” update, which will include expanded functionality for the Xbox
Live and Office hubs, new multitasking abilities and Bing deeply baked into the
user interface.
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