Microsoft buys Nokia – is this the BYOD solution?    

The news that Microsoft is to acquire the mobile phone making arm of Nokia can be seen two ways. One is that it is just a sign of another company thrashing around, trying to find anything that will stop a slow, but steady decline in its fortunes. The other is that it does at last represent the appearance of a new vision in the company that plays to its underlying strengths in the corporate market.

Considering option one, this acquisition could suggest that Microsoft is looking to go head-to-head with in the consumer market Apple’s iPhone and iPad, as well as the growing army of phones and tablets using Google’s Android. If that really is plan A then the company is setting itself up to be a has-been business.

On its current track record there is no future for Microsoft in that business sector. It has tried a couple of times now to break into it and has, by general consensus, failed. It may be number three in the consumer phones market, but it is number three by several miles from iPhone and the Android gang.

Beating Blackberry is, these days, not too much to crow about. But it does point the company in the right direction, the direction of the second possibility – that it has a new vision that plays to its strengths in the corporate market.

Apple’s iPhone and iPad are big in the business market, especially amongst corporate executives. I have, however, written before (in other places) about an observable tendency that Microsoft can exploit if it is sharp enough. That tendency is that the Apple products are the systems to be `seen’ with, especially when walking around conferences, exhibitions and the like. But when it comes to doing the consequential real work – writing reports on topics discussed , for example – many execs still revert to a PC-based laptop.

Why should that be? Well, mainly it is to do with the fact that the corporate systems they are geared to are often based on Microsoft products, and in particular the Office suite of productivity tools. Even if the back office applications are IBM, or Oracle, or SAP, or even Linux-based cloud services, the front-line tools are still often part of Office.

And here is one of the cornerstones of a vision that Microsoft should have adopted explicitly when it first partnered with Nokia back in 2010 and got its own Stephen Elop installed as CEO.

It is telling that Nokia has just announced that Elop will be moving back to Microsoft as part of this deal. There is no word as yet as to what job he will take on, but it will certainly be to head up something.

And that `something’ is likely to be that vision – the pulling together of the company’s cloud delivered services such as Azure and Office Live, coupled with a mobile hardware, operating systems and applications package that gives end users an end-to-end, soup-to-nuts collaborative environment that plays straight to the growing pressure from within businesses for BYOD services.

Such a package could bring a real solution to the dilemma on BYOD that many businesses express – `damned fine idea but the organisational, operational and security issues involved are still far too scary for us to seriously contemplate it’.

Here is a way of delivering solutions to most of those problems in one hit – something that appeals to the natural conservatism of business users. And as an example of that conservatism one just has to look at the number of Windows XP users there still are in the world. One estimate suggests there are still 500 million of them, even though Microsoft put that operating system onto security maintenance only status a couple of years ago or more, and is planning to abandon them completely come April next year.

That conservatism is Microsoft’s strength, and strength in a huge global market for business users. Just at the moment, the company stands on the brink of seeing that strength seep away. But if business users can take their current work environment, port it to the cloud, and then add full connectivity with a range of smartphones and tablets that offer automatic collaboration that can stretch from back-end databases and server-based tools, through the full panoply of Office applications and on to the types of client devices that company staff now want to use and which increasingly make sense in business productivity terms…..? Well, I for one think they would find that attractive.

Add to the mix the fact that Microsoft still has an enormous army of channel partners, from small resellers, through ISVs of all sizes and skillsets, and on to some of the biggest Systems Integrators in the world. They could get a set of tools where much of the background engineering needed to get `back office system A’ to even acknowledge `client device X’ exists, let alone collaborate with it, is already done for them.

Given that many major businesses already use Microsoft extensively, and that they have a tendency to turn to such companies for assistance in establishing their IT infrastructures, applications and business processes, the chances are high that Microsoft could maintain its position as the obvious first choice for business users around the world.

There is, of course, one caveat. Microsoft would really need to turn such a vision into a reality pretty soon. What is more, it would need to get it working effectively and with a fair degree of reliability, straight out of the traps.

With the best will in the world, the company’s track record on this score has not been brilliant over the years. That is why the company should have gone for such a vision when it first cuddled up to Nokia three years ago. By now it would be on Version 3.1 (Service Pack 2) of the service, just at the time BYOD is starting to take off.

And as we all know, `Version 3.1’ and `Service Pack 2’ are the key indicators for conservative business users to pile in and place orders.