Is sounds good in the New York Times, but does the world operate according to the proverb? The enemy of my enemy is my friend…
There’s a point in every analyst’s career when they pull this one out, but it was so overused in the nineties that I’d thought I’d never hear it again. Find the link to the article about Microsoft and Nokia here:
“This appears to be a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said Rob Enderle, an independent technology analyst.
We’ve all been known to say stupid things, but this hackneyed vendor-versus-vendor junk is just not the point anymore. Microsoft is a $50 billion company that has to face facts about the penetration of Windows Mobile. And Nokia is just addressing the idea that many of their users have Microsoft Office.
But we’ve all been there. The reporter calls, and we’re scrambling to pull up the press release. We knock over the botte of scotch next to the keyboard and wipe a few Cheetos off the side of our face, and we dig for the gold.
But my issue with this type of vendor-strategy-centric analysis is that it harkens back to a day in Silicon Valley when it was all about friends and foes. Microsoft versus Sun. Oracle versus everyone. And most companies were pretty small. But now Oracle is buying Sun. And we’re talking about huge corporate enterprises. Large companies don’t play that way. Just look at IBM or HP — they’re too big to think about competition along just one line of business.
And I know that Nokia and Microsoft don’t see it that way. Nokia is the largest manufacturer of mobile devices in the world. Does Windows Mobile appear on their radar? Sure it does, but they see everything in terms of hundreds of millions of handsets. Microsoft’s piddling market share with Windows Mobile is…a sideshow to the issue.
For Microsoft, Nokia is effectively the Microsoft of the mobile market. The company is building a huge presence on smaller devices and in the developing world. Getting Office onto Series 40 and Series 60 devices could be a coup for long-term growth and market share.
So not everything is about Google. And not everything is about mutual enemies. That’s a long-forgotten game theory that once worked sometime in the paleozoic era.
As for the next bad quote, I’ll jump the gun.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens.
This is the universal, non-commital response that every analyst has made to some bizarre question from a reporter. Usually, they’re asking the un-knowable. And you can’t just say that you don’t know.