Introducing Nokia, the software company

By Tim Conneally | Published September 9, 2008, 5:23 PM

As Nokia debuts new services and acquires yet more developers, we're beginning to see the global cell phone leader emerge as a fully-fledged software producer. This from a company whose executives had set its sights on the Internet.

While its strategy to establish itself as a viable name in the Internet services field appears to be gaining a foothold, Nokia also appears -- if inadvertently -- to be attempting to trump Microsoft in the "unsellable name" department. Where Microsoft tends to have comically long and overcategorized product names (yesterday's announcement by Microsoft of "System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Enterprise Server Management License" immediately comes to mind), Nokia's nomenclature route has veered toward the nonsensical.

Last week, the company premiered its Comes with Music store in the UK, and is scheduled today to officially launch its Files on Ovi cloud storage service, that has been in beta since July. Fortunately, the company has stuck to simple names for some of its strongest offerings: Nokia Maps, Sync (its calendar, contact, and task service), and N-Gage (its resurrected mobile gaming platform).

Talk of the world's biggest mobile phone company beginning a deliberate transition into more of a software company began in the first weeks of 2008, when Nokia moved to acquire Trolltech and its patents for Qt and Qtopia, two popular cross-platform application frameworks. It wasn't until June that the acquisition received approval from the European Commission.

Since last year, Nokia has acquired no less than ten companies in a broad spectrum of software and service-related fields, from mapping company Navteq to cloud storage startup Avvenu. Many of these became part of Nokia's online suite Ovi, which offers services not unlike those found in Windows Live Mobile, which is also available on Nokia devices.

Recently, Nokia has shown interest in owning Symbian as it moves toward becoming a free, open mobile platform when the Symbian Foundation combines S60, UIQ, and MOAP(S).

Google, on the other hand, has made well-publicized moves in a convergent direction. The search company has evolved from its roots in software to create at least the platform for its first open source mobile device. Earlier this year, analysts remarked that a search partnership between Nokia and Google was just another example of "coop-etition," where the two met eye-to-eye in search while locked in combat over open source mobile communications.