Yesterday Nokia’s newly-announced strategy to embrace Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform got some serious negative attention from Nokia Plan B, a proposal supposedly put forth by nine unidentified young Nokia investors that called for Nokia to embrace MeeGo as its primary platform, experiment with Windows Phone in the North American market, and say goodbye to new CEO Stephen Elop and selected other Nokia executives. Today, Nokia Plan B appears to be no more: the plan’s manifesto site is gone, replaced with a link to a Twitter page that claims Nokia Plan B was a hoax all along.
“There are no ‘nine young investors’ just one very bored engineer who really likes his iPhone,” reads the Twitter feed.
Of course, there’s no evidence the Twitter feed is any more legitimate than the original site may—or may not—have been.
Nonetheless, many of the ideas put forward in Nokia Plan B’s manifesto resonated with both Nokia fans and the technology community, and Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has spent most of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona trying to justify his do-or-die partnership with Microsoft and adoption of the Windows Phone platform. Long before Apple had any presence in the mobile phone market, Nokia rose to dominance by controlling both its hardware and software development. The company’s new relationship with Microsoft has the company running the risk that it will be just another OEM for Microsoft’s operating system: perhaps the “first among equals,” given the seemingly exclusive nature of Nokia’s deal with Microsoft, but nonetheless captive to Microsoft’s technology and development tools.
