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Nokia Corp.’s announcement it would be dropping MeeGo and going Windows Phone 7 caused quite a “kerfuffle” inside Intel Corp., admitted Peter Biddle, general manager of Intel’s AppUp products and services.
Speaking to RCR Unplugged last week at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain, Biddle said the day the news broke came as quite a shock to the chip firm. “I refer to it now as a word that begins with ‘F’ and is followed by Friday,” he said adding “like, fantastic Friday, except not fantastic.”
Biddle confessed that while he certainly wasn’t overjoyed at Nokia’s news, Intel was doing its best to think about things from a corporate relations standpoint. “We’ve worked with Microsoft [Corp.] for 30 years, so it’s like our two favorite partners just got married! how could we possibly be entirely upset about it?” he mused. Perhaps because it’s more akin to the bride running off with the groom’s best friend?
“We are magnanimous and we have been in this business for three decades, and stuff like this happens,” he shrugged. “You look at it, you figure out what the best thing to do is, and you move on.”
Indeed, Intel is doing its best to remain upbeat and carry on with business as usual, telling us that Nokia’s departure from the partnership really had little impact all things considered.
“MeeGo is an open source operating system and Qt is also open source. So whether or not a given partner is fully behind it, partially behind it or not behind it at all, I’d like to think open source software doesn’t live or die purely on the whims of a single company,” said Biddle, adding “we’ve got a bunch of other partners.”
Who those partners are remains to be seen, but Intel should never be underestimated and Biddle claims there are a host of interested parties out there looking for a “third alternative” to Android and iOS domination of the mobile space for the next one or two million devices.
“They are explicitly stating that what they want is something as viable but clearly intangibly different from Android and iOS,” he told us adding that he sees iOS as a walled platform and Android as a gated community.
“There are limitations on behaviors around Android,” he explained. “You can’t check into main, they [Google Inc.] own that. Meanwhile, MeeGo is open source. If you have great innovation to add into MeeGo tomorrow, you can do that, and you’re checking in to the exact same source code as the kernel team at Intel,” he said.
Intel is also exploring new partnerships of its own in the software space. Admitting that several weeks ago he would have had a different answer, Biddle says he’s now fascinated by potential opportunities with WebOS and says Intel is “definitely going to take a look at it.”
An alliance of losers or a viable third way? Only the future holds the answer to that one.
