I was blown away yesterday with the pre-news news that Microsoft were going to port office onto Nokia devices. The announcement today though was overshadowed by a reported legal opinion that made MS Word, 2003 and later illegal, or at least unsellable by Microsoft.
So on the heels of that announcement, the Co Press Release today, that let’s us know that Microsoft and Nokia are getting in to bed to bring Office to Nokia handsets, gets a little bit tarnished, Office without Word? The pre press/leak prevarication would have had us believe, we would see a full fledged solution for MS Office on Symbian/Nokia devices today.
The press release though, seems like a lot of mutual back slapping, and confirmation, that Microsoft and Nokia, are going to work on bringing these services to Symbian phones.
“The scope of the alliance between Microsoft and Nokia, and potential value for the enterprise and individual is significant,” said Stephen Drake, VP of Mobility & Telecom at IDC. “By bringing Microsoft’s productivity solutions to Nokia’s large customer base, the two companies should be better able to serve the needs of the growing mobile worker population, which IDC estimates to reach 1 billion worldwide in 2011.”
This is clearly just a statement of intent, and partnership, promising nothing within the next eighteen months, but after that watch out! 
Although a partnership between two of the largest tech providers in the world is not small news, it offers nothing for the near future.
Does this though mean Nokia is giving Quick Office notice?
Quick Office has been the translator, for multiple mobile Os’s, it spans Android,Blackberry, Symbian and now iPhone. How will this affect third party devs that work across multiple platforms. Here’s a Quote from Matt Millers blog that sums up what this developer thinks,
Having supported the Symbian platform for many years, Quickoffice recognizes the push toward connected mobile services. While our office suite is the world’s overwhelming market share leader on the Symbian platform, it represents only a percentage of our worldwide revenues. Quickoffice is excited about the work we’re doing on other leading and emerging platforms and our direct-to-consumer sales, as evidenced by our number one business app for iPhone and our upcoming announcements with Android. Quickoffice is committed to bringing the best, most innovative products to market, in support of our vision for the mobile connected office.” Alan Masarek, CEO.
* We believe that the Office and Mobile Productivity market is an important space. This announcement highlights the relevance of our Mobile Office and mobile productivity market.
* Quickoffice will continue to support our worldwide user base. We’re shipping on over 100M smartphones and our next version, which includes many of these announced features by Microsoft, will ship on 200M Symbian phones before Microsoft’s product comes out in the marketplace. We have a robust feature roadmap coming on Symbian and our experience on this platform is unmatched.
* Quickoffice is one of the leading Symbian developer, but our sales on Symbian devices does not make up a majority of Quickoffice revenue. Quickoffice has always developed for a diversified portfolio of smartphone OS’ and will continue to innovate and expand our product line. Our Quickoffice for iPhone’ suite is the #1 application in the Business Category on the App Store, and our file management capabilities, which provide remote access to content and documents, highlight a few features in our roadmap.
* Nokia and Microsoft are touching on a suite of services which we refer to as “Connected Services”, and it represents the next generation of our thinking in the Mobile Office market. Quickoffice has some great solutions coming out in this space which will make Office accessible to a broader audience.
As always, Microsoft are chasing their tails on this one, shutting the gate after the horse has bolted so to speak. They somehow seem oblivious to the fact that others have gone before them and made their platform accessible to other OS’s, mobile and… well mobile, and implemented solutions really well. Maybe a possible positive outcome from a partnership like this, is learning how to focus, Nokia’s one track focus seems to be what has made them the leading handset distributor in the world. Maybe the partnership will allow Microsoft to Micro Manage all of the different arms in the conglomerate, more efficiently.
MS Office on Nokia, but apparently Word’s illegal?
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