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0 pointschalst15y ago0 comments

that makes them more valuable to Microsoft ... because Microsoft would pay them handsomely to do so

So why did Nokia not get a better deal from Microsoft? The drop in Nokia's shares wasn't because they went for WP7, it's because they didn't get any kind of exclusivity deal.

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rst15y ago· 1 in thread

I'm not really sure we know what kind of deal they got; a lot depends on how those "billions of dollars" of payments are structured.

For instance, the maps licensing deal: does this mean that Nokia will be getting royalties (for the mapping software) on sales of other manufacturers' handsets? If so, they haven't got an exclusive, but they do have a favored position.

EDIT: if it's just advertising services, on the other hand, which is all Elop explicitly mentioned, then this does look pretty raw.

chalstOP15y ago

About details: agreed. But you'd think Nokia would say something concrete about how great the deal is, given their shareholder's mood at the moment. What's the plan? Use the billions to make a surprise dividend?

Maps is the kind of thing analysts were looking at. But I understood the deal as saying that MS would have a special search interface for Nokia users that integrated with Maps, not that WP7 would syndicate the service. That would be in the category of "less that complete surrender over UI".

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