Siemens Joins Forces with Nokia

First Siemens joined the Symbian group, then it licensed Motorola’s phone software and now they have done a similar deal with Nokia. Siemens has licensed Nokia’s Series 60 mobile phone software platform. In addition the two companies will cooperate on both industry standards and software application standards. No one can fault Siemens for hedging their bets and getting closer to Nokia, but it’s unclear what, if any, impact this will have on Siemen’s interest in purchasing Motorola’s CDMA infrastructure unit. Update: This article sheds some more light on this agreement and makes two interesting points…

1)Rallying behind Symbian is about positioning against Microsoft. OK, we buy that. But while these two will compete, our take is that Microsoft will dominate the enterprise side and Symbian will lead on the consumer side (sorry Symbian). 2)Instead of equipment maker ddoing deal with each other for standards, they should be doing deals with carriers who are begging for more influence in device design and applications.