Greater than the sum of their parts?
Internet services giant Yahoo has announced a press conference on Monday, according to All Things Digital, with the following hook: "Please join Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz for an exciting announcement about providing global consumers with rich online and mobile experiences, and bringing forward a new era in keeping consumers connected."
The WSJ tech site then got on the phone and got confirmation from multiple sources that the event would announce a partnership with mobile phone giant Nokia, in which the latter would pre-install a bunch of Yahoo stuff like email, search, etc onto its phones. The partnership has been codenamed ‘Project Nike', and has apparently been on the drawing board for a while.
If true, this will mark the third major technology company Nokia has got into bed with in the past year. Back at MWC 2010 Nokia unveiled a new mobile OS, jointly developed with Intel, called MeeGo - and its intimacy with Intel makes us believe Nokia will be one of the pioneers of Intel smartphone chip adoption. Then, earlier this month, Nokia announced a unified communications collaboration with Microsoft.
In the face of continued innovation from Apple and Google, there's a growing sense of desperation from many of the tech behemoths that are accustomed to dictating the direction of the industry, not reacting to it. Apple has shown that controlling the whole platform is the way forward if you want to make some serious money out of smartphones, which is why we're seeing so many other platforms offered up.
The question with these tech giant collaborations is: can they be greater than the sum of their parts? Right now Nokia lacks a killer smartphone offering, Yahoo lacks a killer email or search offering, Microsoft desperately needs to turn its mobile OS/app fortunes around and Intel is making its first, faltering steps into smartphone chips.
These four companies - we wouldn't be surprised if there were more - have the resources to make a killer smartphone proposition to take on Apple and Google. Whether they can truly collaborate and produce a coherent offering, rather than a cobbled-together mess, may well determine whether or not they will be players or also-rans in the mobile Internet era.
