Is Seattle the biblical “Garden of Eden” when it comes to cell phone mythology? Once banished, Microsoft seems to have found its way back to the Garden of Eden with a sleeping giant in its tow.
In the beginning, there was McCaw Cellular, which reaped cellular bandwidth like the vines covering the Garden’s Tree of Knowledge. And McCaw begat Cellular One and then AT&T Wireless, and it was good. And lo, Deutsche Telecom looked down upon the fertile spawning grounds. And the roots for T-Mobile were sown in the green, fertile field and streams. Farther away, in a land called Finland, a giant named Nokia loomed large as the biggest cell phone kingdom on the planet.
And lo, the garden was astir. There was Adam (who gave an RSS standard his name of “Atom.”). There was Eve, who claimed Adam’s backbone, or at least the high throughput of portions thereof. Above it all, in the Tree of Knowledge, appeared a hyperactive arboreal primate named Ballmer, swinging outstretched from limb to limb.
Meanwhile, in a mountainous region named Mountain View, a leviathan named “Google” had cornered another cell phone giant known as Motorola. Google was drunk with the notion of acquiring the “Moto” cell phone maker. The patents were flowing like wine.
Then, one day, returning to the Garden was an ex-pat named Elop. Elop, hailing once from Microsoft but now from the kingdom of Nokia, enlisted the Ballmer to invest in the Nokia ecosystem which was called Android. Ballmer insisted his Windows Phone platform be the new standard platform for Nokia.
Then came the “Floods.”
It is unclear what thunderous forces were responsible for the next part of the story.
Alas, a soothsayer named Stratechery came to theorize that Nokia, the giant, was on its last legs. Up against the wall, it was either going to switch to Android or was on the verge of going bankrupt. Said Stratchery, had Nokia abandoned Windows Phone, then Windows Phone would be dead!
Other industry observers opined that, in a similar vein, Google had its hand forced by Motorola’s threat to sue other Android OEM’s for all they were worth.
The Garden of Eden was under attack by the hardware systems they had breathed new life into through software.
Was Microsoft put in the position where it didn’t have a choice? Did they jump into the Nokia deal, or were they pushed?
Would the Nokia 1020 phone be a world beater if it ran iOS or Android instead of Windows Phone?
We’ll leave these questions up to Sunday schoolers. Amen! [24×7]
