Building the next great mobile software developer opportunity

GLOBAL – On Friday Feb 11th our two companies announced a partnership that we believe will shake up the mobile phone market. Together Nokia and Microsoft are bringing to bear unparalleled and complementary strengths in global smartphone and mobile phone market share, hardware, software and services. Based on these strengths, we will build a new, global ecosystem that creates a wealth of new opportunities and innovative experiences.

However, we can’t do it alone.

We need you: our developers. Over the years, you, our developer communities, have created great experiences for your customers. You’ve also given us feedback that you want new opportunities, accelerated innovation, and access to more consumers. We are going to realize this future based on a shared set of principles about what developers want and deserve:

• Opportunity: a large number of customers with unparalleled global reach

• Feedback: so that you can improve your applications and games

• Ovi Store and Windows Phone Marketplace: a great shopping experience, where your creativity can be discovered

• Flexibility: in how you are compensated or your work– in dollars or notoriety

• Amazing tools: to take creativity from idea to sale

• Structure: a prescriptive roadmap that balances opportunity and diversity while maintaining the stability of the platform

• Innovation: combining services assets to drive innovation including putting Nokia’s Ovi Maps at the heart of key Microsoft assets like Bing and AdCenter.

We appreciate that applications and games are many peoples’ livelihoods, and that developers deserve respect and transparency. We further understand that choosing a mobile platform is a serious commitment of time and energy that we must earn. This new conversation is just starting and we would like it to be an open and continuing dialogue.

To that end, we want to make clear that our alliance represents a long-term commitment to developers. Nokia developers working with Qt or Java will continue to do so and enjoy healthy demand for those. Nokia has an installed base of 225 million Symbian devices, and plans to sell 150 million more, and Series 40 has an addressable market of 600 million devices today. Nokia continue to enhance and innovate on those platforms and in Qt tools. Nokia, and now Microsoft, are committed to making sure that your contributions to and investments in the Nokia ecosystem will be worthwhile. In the coming weeks we will provide more information about programs that will help you access the Symbian and Qt opportunities more effectively.

Nokia’s Windows Phone portfolio will support the existing, free Windows Phone Developer Tools. Nokia and Microsoft will support developers wishing to port their application to Windows Phone. Both Nokia and Microsoft manage rich application and game commerce platforms in Ovi Store and the Windows Phone Marketplace. We believe that both platforms bring distinct strengths to the alliance, and we are planning to combine these strengths into a single great commerce experience for developers and consumers alike. Our monetization and analytics enablers will support all device platforms including the world’s largest distribution channel with operator billing.

We still have much work to do and we will provide you, our developers, with more details in the weeks and months to come. We will ensure that developers can count on timely and prescriptive guidance on the implications and opportunities of this new alliance. For now, we hope that you are as excited about the long-term potential of this alliance as we are, and that you are already thinking of new application and games that you’ll bring to market to take advantage of the significant volumes of Nokia Windows Phones, as well as the existing and future Symbian and Series 40 devices from Nokia.

If you’re interested in learning more about developing for Windows Phone, please visit http://create.msdn.com. For the latest guidance to Nokia developers, visit http://forum.nokia.com.

Sincerely

Tero Ojanpera, Executive Vice President, Services, Nokia
Terry Myerson, VP Windows Phone Engineering

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