Wow. Time flies when you're having fun. With all the rumors in the last couple of days that Nokia is interested in Palm (again), I decided to look back on the last time I commented on this type of rumor.
June 15, 2009. That's five months, almost to the day, since I last wrote about this. The last time this rumor was flying around, it was about Dell. This time, the Nokia rumors are making me think of a Guns N' Roses song where W. Axl Rose says during the chorus "Sometimes I feel like I'm beating a dead horse..."
Now, with all the rumor mongers around who are saying "buy low" or "sell high," I did nonetheless find one article on the web today that I thought did a great job of synthesizing the issue at hand. What does Nokia really get from a deal like this? The Palm brand is still very valuable (I don't care what the nay sayers say) and Nokia is waaaaaay too proud to not have all its products called Nokia. Palm by Nokia? Enh...not so much.
Nokia's webOS? Nope. Besides, a 1/2 billion dollars after buying out the rest of Symbian, as well as their efforts on Maemo, what the heck would Nokia do with a 3rd platform? Which one of the two would they drop....or would they concentrate solely on webOS. Not gonna happen, in my opinion.
So back to the article I mentioned. It has some good points, but I'll take issue with one comment. Chris Hazleton at the 451 Group is quoted in the article as saying:
"I agree the weakness in Nokia is Symbian. The software is kluge, there are a lot of dead ends, it's not as slick as other operating systems out there. It was engineered so long ago that touch wasn't a key in navigating around the OS. [Nokia] tried to force touch upon Symbian to get around that."
Me thinks Mr. Hazleton is confusing S60 with the Symbian core (or at least was misquoted). For the record, the Symbian core is not that bad. That said, I personally find S60 to be one of the most confusing and yes - kluge - user interfaces out there.
So let's stop this rumor mongering about Nokia buying Palm and focus on more accretive debates. If you REALLY must insist on speculating about who might want to buy Palm, then let's have an intelligent debate about it.
I for one think Cisco could/should look at them. How's THAT for stirring up the pot!
