 So we're going to jump right in. So let's go to Doug and say, Doug, what's your assessment of the news with the Nokia Microsoft thing? And just from a market perspective, just describe the landscape out there. Obviously, everyone knows what Apple and Android, Steve Jobs has turned Apple into a huge money maker. Apple stores, everyone knows that. And Android now, NASA penetration in Asia and Europe and US with Android. How did that affect the overall market? What are some of the dynamics in this mobile smartphone race? Well, a broad question. But there's no question that the mobile market is moving towards high-end devices and smartphones. And that is a march that has begun and is going to continue to accelerate. When that started happening, what you also saw was that the center of gravity for mobile really shifted from Europe or Asia to Silicon Valley. And you saw a lot of the significant powers who had previously been quite powerful in mobile beginning to lose out. Nokia was probably the poster child there. And so Nokia sensing that the market was moving to the high end did the right thing in terms of understanding that software was gonna be a differentiator and initiated their own software development projects to be able to differentiate their phone, most notably with Mego. So if I were a McKinsey consultant inside Nokia, I would probably tell Nokia to do what they in fact did, which was differentiate via high end software platform so they could bring together the best of software with the best of hardware and really add to a differentiated product as well as develop an ecosystem. You have to remember that Nokia tried to do that as well insofar as they have moved OV forward. The big issue was that despite being probably the right strategy, it wasn't succeeding. I'm not sure I know entirely why that was a case, but they weren't executing fast enough. And so Nokia needed to change. Ramin, you actually, and Nokia has been around. I mean, we all know Nokia phones. They were the really first ones to pioneer kind of small form factor, you know, cell phones and mobile phones, huge market share. But in the past three years, you wrote in a post your observation was they went from hero to zero in three years. Talk about what, how big were they and what really happened to them? So I think that first of all, yeah, they were one of the largest mobile companies out there, especially in Europe where they've been, you know, the Nordic ecosystem has been one of the leading, basically for mobiles in the world. And so what we have in Finland and Sweden is comparable in many aspects to what there is, for example, South Korea or Japan. So it's been driving the industry and the entire country forward. That's been a very, very important thing. That's one thing. One thing is that people consider now the failure of Nokia in the recent years. I actually dated back a little bit further. If you remember back when phones had no touch screens, we had the, well, you had to have a keyboard in there. And so what they had was the clamshells. You remember the clamshells, they would unfold and stuff like a little bit like Star Trek. And so basically Nokia did not build these phones, if you remember, they completely missed that train. So what happened is that already then they started lagging and that's when they started pushing the N95 and phones like that. So they started lagging there and started pushing then their own platforms and missed the whole basically UIS slash iPhone experience. Yeah, Doug, so you worked at Yahoo and Google, obviously. They had massive early penetration with mobile initiatives because they're in the content business and then obviously Google infrastructure as well. What were some of the dynamics back then? Because mobile seemed to be in carrier driven business. They do, the phone guys did deals with the carriers for connectivity and then content essentially was just over the transit, wasn't really thought up much. But with smartphones, content and applications to the center of it, what's changed that caught Nokia off guard? Was it just the fact that they just didn't have support for apps and was it the management? How would you describe why that happened? Well, I think a couple of things. One, I agree with your point that they missed, Nokia previously had missed some transitions to say the clamshell phone versus the candy bar phone. And I think that Nokia, that was the first sign of Nokia maybe not listening to where the market was going. So I think that was an issue. But you asked about how the mobile market is now versus say four or five years ago. Carriers are still important. They were more important though with regard to distribution of content. It used to be that if you were at a Yahoo or a smaller company, you would go to a carrier and try to strike the big carrier deal to get distribution for your service and or content. And that's because consumers were all being led by carrier portals to- And devices that were pre-configured like they say on a deck, right? That was a term they've used, like if you're on the deck, you're a winner. Right, and that was a big key. And indeed, that proved out to be the case with many content providers early on. What's happened now though, is with the rise of the smartphone and in particular with the rise of platforms, iOS, Android, notably among them, what's more important now is getting in the market. And carriers really by and large aren't controlling, they certainly don't control what goes into the iPhone market. And on Android, there's an independent Android market, there are still carrier markets, but they become less important there. As in so far as pushing content. But I will say this, the carrier role in distributing handsets is still very significant. Just look at the way Verizon and Google work together to push out Android. They made a big difference. So you're saying, so let's just get this right. So back in the old days, five years ago, the carriers were in charge. You had to grovel, kiss the ring as they say, and really kind of get the carriers, and they knew that, right? So they had that power. But what did Apple do? What happened with Apple and us? There was a standoff with Verizon, now they're in Verizon. Did that completely change the game? And in what way are the carriers now less powerful than they were then? Or are you saying they're just as powerful? No, no, no, it's different. What I'm saying is there's a lot of people who will say that carriers don't matter as much as they used to. And I think in so far as it relates to pushing out content or promoting content, while they are still a factor, they're not as important as they used to be. They still are a very major factor though in terms of pushing handsets out to the market. I think what Apple did was they came through with a breakthrough two orders of magnitude improvement in a product and were able to call the shots on who was gonna control what on the device. And because it was such an off the charts product, they were able to gain concessions from carriers where other OEMs and or service providers in the past hadn't been able to. So let's talk about Microsoft. I mean, Microsoft and Nokia. A new competitive positioning, honestly, in the marketplace between the two, it's a heavyweight. Obviously we'll talk about the deal in a second, but in the sense of there's alternatives to say Apple and now Android, and you now have this mega powerhouse. What is that gonna mean for the carriers? Now the carriers, they wanna stay in control. So they're probably gonna be happy with Nokia and Microsoft teaming up. Are carriers embracing Android? Doug, do you see that happening or is it more cautious? No, well there's no question that carriers have embraced Android. You look across the globe and many carriers as well as other OEMs have embraced Android. Reluctively embracing or given the alternatives Apple? Well I think that's a factor in it. There's no doubt about it, that when you looked at the value proposition that Apple brought to a carrier, look, here's a great product and I'm gonna call all the shots and you're gonna share significant bits of revenue with me, the product was good enough to get carriers to sign up to that and it has worked very well for carriers and will continue to do so. Whereas when Android came along, they had a different economic value proposition and also the platform frankly was originally designed to be able to give carriers some modicum of control over the platform and it became a very attractive alternative to Android. I think in many ways, the advent of the iPhone helped the Android platform. Now when you go to the Microsoft Windows announcement, I think that generally carriers will like it because it takes what has really been a two horse race and could, we have to see, could make it a three horse race and if a carrier is negotiating with OEMs, you'd rather be able to select from more suppliers rather than few. Well let's break that down. So we're here at theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, we have Doug and Ramin. Doug is a executive in the mobile space for many years in the heart of Silicon Valley and Palo Alto and a good friend, Ramin. Just moved from Finland with his startup here in Palo Alto, now living here and doing your startup. And so we're at the ground floor. So Silicon Valley is now the new innovation center. It's the West Coast. I mean, Nokia is somewhat here with the Microsoft deal. But Microsoft's been down this road before. We've seen Microsoft move from a PC player into a huge ecosystem that's gone into corporations and have done great. They have a huge ecosystem of developers. Still haven't cracked the code really, some say on the service provider side but have had experience doing deals. So Doug, you pointed out the Fortune article that was online and can't pull it up because we're not connected yet, but Ricky could. But eight deals that they point out, Microsoft has done in the past in the spirit of getting into mobile. Erics and Sendoo, Motorola, Palm, which is now HP, Nortel, LG and Verizon. And so that's some of the carnage. And none of them ended well. This was an attempt by Microsoft to get out and really push their platform and they did big deals with OEMs and big deals with carriers, sometimes bringing big money to the table to kind of buy their way in and it really hasn't worked well. And I think the reason it didn't work well is that the product simply wasn't there. Windows Mobile wasn't a satisfactory consumer experience. What's different now is that Windows Phone 7 generally gets okay reviews. And while it's very easy to criticize Microsoft and as a former Yahoo and a former Googler, I'd be all too happy to do that, quite frankly, you gotta hand it to them. They stuck to it and they've improved their platform. Well, I wrote a post. We'll come to it, I'll get to you in a second, but I wrote a blog post and did a video clip about the new Microsoft that could be. And what I was basically saying is that Microsoft really hasn't been the same since the DOJ handicap them and kneecap them in the late 90s. Just haven't been competitive, but the recent things we're seeing with Bing and Google going at it with Search and Balmer reorganizing in this move, you gotta have some hope there. But there's a huge ecosystem around Microsoft. And so the carriers like... But yet it hasn't come to mobile. Haven't come to mobile, but the carriers want a three-horse race and on the ad side we're seeing that as well with AdMob and Quattro. So you got Google's got AdMob and Apple's got Quattro and you've got Millennial Media, the Independent there. So you gotta trifecta going on there. Now here you've got Microsoft Nokia, Apple, and Android, so you've got the three-horse race there. So I think the carriers are gonna like it, so I think that's a good observation. The question that everyone is talking about that we were talking about is the developer impact. And one of the things that Ramin, you wrote about on your blog post that people have been talking about is Nokia has been a developer nightmare for many, many years, from having 40-something browsers to support. We've heard talking to developers and there's ton of support issues, fragmentation. So Ramin, talk about the developer challenge and then talk about the real silver lining in this Nokia deal in the gaming developer market. So if you can talk about that. Sure, of course. So basically, we've gone from what you described as exactly where it is. It was a nightmare to develop for Nokia for a very long time. Back then when they were a big developer, a big manufacturer, it was the thing you had to do, right? You'd port a Simian app. You had companies that would help you port to all the phones. You'd test it on 50 different handsets and all that. And so you just had to deal with it. Simian 60 and Siri 60 and all that. Then when Apple came here and just standardized the whole thing and you could just have one app that runs and everything, that made everything simpler and they were the leading app store. So when I've got this comment from Jan Olesour who's the developer of Gravity, which is the thing, one of the top selling apps on the Simian store, basically on the Ovi store. There's the top Twitter client on the Nokia, said that essentially the platform was pretty horrible and he was one of the top developers on that thing. Why? Because one, first of all- Top developer saying it's horrible. Yes, publicly. Yeah, not good for PR, not good for your image when App Store is crushing it. When you got the Angry Birds, by the way, a Finland company, Finnish guys, right doing that. I mean- I'm pushing mostly on that. Yeah, they got a movie deal, all kinds of gaming deals versus the guys struggling on Nokia. Angry Birds are rocking on App Store. So the problem was that you had the device fragmentation that I touched before but the other thing was that they pushed for Qt and Qt now is gone, basically. The reason for Qt was that you would have a two- Explain Qt for the folks out there. Qt is basically a development framework that developers can use to create apps that would run both on Simian phones and Maemo, Migo phones, basically. And the big push of Nokia in the past year or something has been to convert developers to move to the Qt platform, simply to support the entire Nokia ecosystem. But what happened yesterday is that the announced Qt would not be ported on Windows Phone 7. So what that means is that essentially, if you've made an app for Nokia in the past years, it's gone. It's screwed. Yeah, exactly. And so before that, there were big problems on the OV Store to sell apps, et cetera. The experience on the store was pretty bad. So a good decision for, good decisions, but they have nothing to lose. Exactly. On the developer front, they were sliding into oblivion. It was difficult and overall it's better now. Given Microsoft has a huge developer track record, they've made money for their developers. History, Doug, and of the years of Microsoft in the 80s, 90s. Yeah. Especially made a lot of money for their ecosystem. But not on mobile yet. Not on mobile, yeah. Not on mobile, and that's the big issue that remains out there is that when you look at where iOS is now and Android is now, they both have huge ecosystems. The big question is, can Nokia and Microsoft and maybe others working together develop an ecosystem that brings in lots of apps? One thing that Mark Hawkins has been bullish on, and I have, because my son is 15, going on 16, is the huge Xbox presence. And I think when you see Zynga, social games, Doug, you've been involved in a lot of startups in the casual gaming market. It's just exploding. So one bright side of this is the angle around Xbox and gaming. So are the gaming developers pumped on this, or what's the update on that? Definitely. So one thing that people forget a lot in this deal is that Microsoft has done beautiful in the gaming market. They were the underdog, you remember a few years ago, when they launched their first Xbox, nobody believed in it. And everybody said that they were a computer company that couldn't make games, et cetera. Now the Xbox is the second platform behind the Nintendo Wii. So they've done, they've performed extremely well. They've pioneered all the online gaming. They've done the independent gaming and all that. So they've actually do to push, build a really good relationship with game developers very quickly with very good development tools. Now what's happening is that this development tool called, for example, XNA that allows independent developers to create small games on Xbox Live has been ported, of course, to Windows Phone 7 and is available on the Nokia phones. So that means is that instantly now Nokia has a huge ecosystem of games available on their phones. So I'm very quickly at least. So in the mobile business, like in the web business, for developers, they care about distribution and monetization, right? So Apple's done a good job there. Android's been more of an open approach. How do you guys feel about this Microsoft Nokia deal relative to those two factors? Distribution and monetization. So just regarding the gaming thing, what I was getting at. On the stand gaming, though. I was, yeah, I'll finish that point because what's important, it's really, really big is that Microsoft has licenses such as Halo and a very good partnership, for example, with Activision Blizzard doing the Call of Duty games and things like that. So what happens there is that if you want a AAA game on the phone, it's going to be on the Nokia platform now. And that's a big change compared with what you have currently on Apple, which is smaller games. Do you think that'll drive purchase decisions? Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, we were talking about you. Yeah, we were talking about this earlier. You mentioned your son, Ivan, 11 year old son, who is very aware of what's going on with smartphones all across the board, Android, iPhone, and web OS included. The one ad that he's reacted to on TV is a Windows mobile ad and he came up to me and he said, hey, Dad, I want a new phone. I want that one that works on Xbox. Yeah, because they're connecting on Xbox. So with the headphones and their friends, it's a social network and a game. There's also the angle that, if you remember, two weeks ago, Sony announced the PlayStation phone. So basically, there's a phone now that will have all the PlayStation one and PSN store and PSN games also that's going to be competing directly in that space. So now you have a move towards real games that are going to be on leading mobile platforms and with the major brands of gaming that are pushing towards that. So this begs the question in that line of thinking, Xbox, kids want the Xbox phone, Facebook. Microsoft has a relationship with Facebook. Possible Facebook phone. One that works with Facebook and Xbox. Is that the game changer? Is that the choke hold that could put Microsoft over the top possibly? There's already as well. You've worked on these integration deals with Yahoo, SBC, a lot of complicated moving parts. Is that a land grab? You think it's possible, these kinds of new deals? Well, reportedly Facebook has its own phone efforts underway, quite independent of Microsoft. And so what happens between Facebook and Microsoft is hard to say. I would say though, to the point that you bring up, there is a big challenge ahead of Nokia and Microsoft on working on this partnership. You mentioned the article in Fortune that we talked about where there was a kind of a history of failure with Microsoft mobile alliances. Microsoft is going to need to work harder to manage this partnership. So is Nokia to really make this work. They've talked about... Who works harder? Who works harder? Microsoft or Nokia on this partnership? That's Nokia, of course. Those are just saying that for the finish viewers, I'm sorry. Well, I mean, Microsoft's got eight failures under their belt. I mean, and Nokia's organizational change, Doug, we didn't get into that, but if you look at the actual substantive change in the Nokia organization, I mean, is it substantial that they've made massive sweeping reorg? Is it... Well, from the press release that I... It kind of looks to me that Nokia is kind of business as usual, a couple of people changes and they consolidate it underneath smart devices, but it's the same Nokia. I would... Well, a couple of things on that. One, to your point on the organizational structure, based on my reading of the press release, it didn't look like there were really major changes there. Certainly, they have de-prioritized Mego and as a result, the executive that was leading the Mego development is leading Nokia, but other than that, there's a lot... Leaving, leaving. Leaving, leaving. Leaving, okay. Yeah, I'm sorry, leaving Nokia. Other than that, there's a lot of the same organizations or close derivatives thereof in place led by the same executives, but the burning platform memo, the memo that was leaked to the press that Elop wrote about being on a burning oil rig platform faced with a choice of standing on the rig and risking sure death because you'd be burned in the fire versus jumping into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. He obviously has chosen to jump. That was... Pretty aggressive. It was a very aggressive and among the most courageous... At a good time, they have market share power. I mean, even though they're declining, the numbers are real massive. Hence, do you think Nokia's gotta do that then? Absolutely. I see that memo as exemplary, I hope, of a new resolve by Nokia overall. I will tell you that if I had a CEO kind of strike that rallying cry, I mean, I would be inspired. I think that was a brilliant move on his part. It's decisiveness in business, as you know. You gotta make some decisive calls as the commander in chief of a business. That's pretty decisive. There's no ambiguity on that direction. This deal is basically saying we're betting the ranch on Microsoft smartphone relationship. I would like to wait a little bit on that because I agree that on the business side, it's the right move to do. It's a really good thing. Overall, Nokia today is a much stronger company, a much better company. Do you wanna agree or disagree? I mostly agree, but I'll put a little smell in. Okay. The overall, Nokia will have better phones, a better app store, better games and all that and better support for developers. That's a very good thing. That's a bold move and they're doing it the best way they can. But Nokia is also a company that's been built on tech geeks. Basically, I've been pushing open source products. Let me push you very technical products and believing in things like Symbian, Migo and you have thousands of people in that company who've worked very hard on that, hating Microsoft for several years and trying to build their own thing because they thought it was better. And they swooped all that in one day. It's kind of like Microsoft taking over a sun. Exactly. I mean this thing. Exactly. So the conversion you're gonna have. So this is a cultural issue, right? Exactly. So hence the rallying cry from the CEO jumping out of the burning oil rig into the icy North Atlantic's. Yet thousands of people are walking out. We heard reported not yet verified, but on one hand people are gonna rally around the CEO. Yet there's a whole camp of people who are like in revolt. So how do you see that playing out? Honestly, it's gotta take, I think the answer to that we can see better in 18 months. I think a lot of people are obviously gonna stay because they love the company and overall Nokia is a great company, but it's gonna be a very difficult conversion. Doug, how would you manage that? I mean you've been a senior executive and you kind of are facing some of these decisions in previous jobs you've been in running and managing organizations. So how would you handle the discourse? You know, you had a group of people who have been fighting, hating Microsoft. Their failed product, basically. Technically great, probably. You know, all this great stuff just the market didn't spin their way. How do you manage that? Well, first of all, I would not compare anything I've done to the order of magnitude of the issue that ELOP is dealing with, so just to be clear on that. But what I can talk to is the partnership angle that I raised before. You know, when we were doing partnerships at Yahoo with big telcos, there was clearly a culture class there. There wasn't a history of hating one another, certainly. But there is the stereotypical view of Silicon Valley that telcos are lumbering giants and the stereotypical view of telcos that people running around in Silicon Valley are a bunch of yahoo's. You know, more broadly speaking, pun intended. And that was difficult to manage. And the way you get around that, certainly, is one through a lot of relationship management. At every level of the company and across every function, you need to do that, I think, in a big, big way. You need to get the relationships of the product guys working with the product guys, the engineering guys, working with the engineering guys, and so on and so forth. You really need to do that. I think also, as a leader, you've got to point out what the other party is bringing to you. And you also have to point out that you are just as critical to their success as they are to yours. And you need to keep coming back to that. And then I also think, very importantly, you need to establish some shared objectives between the two companies that both sides watch from the same sheet of paper all the time and tie your success to their success, your metrics to their metrics, and really make it happen. And then every step along the way, where you've got a success, you've got to celebrate it. I would say also that basically, Nokia has this big problem of image. Nokia has had no evangelists for the past few years, right? So for Google, it's been very obvious who's been speaking, who's been representing the company Apple, even more so. Nokia not really. And the identity of Nokia so far has been in the recent phones that they'd be the open source company, right? The N900 was pitched that way that you could run Linux and all that. And essentially, that Nokia is that now. There is no open source Nokia anymore. So building evangelists basically and pushing a message out there of like we have a new identity where the gaming phone company or the business phone company or something like that. It's gotta be one of the essential efforts. I think getting closer to developers and saying, well, now we're more towards you. What's your opinion and what have you been hearing obviously from the folks inside your country and around the community, started a community around how long it's gonna take and what is the sequence that Nokia might have to do? I'm asking you to mention, you know, they're basically starting at ground zero again in what you're basically saying and there's a lot of dynamics Doug pointed out. What do you think they're gonna do first and what's their priorities, what have you been hearing? So there's a lot of speculation as to is Nokia even gonna remain a Finnish company? As in, is this a move to sell to Microsoft? Is this a restructuration to make it fit better towards Microsoft? And the thing is that the relationship that they have now with Microsoft is something a lot closer than if they had started using Android, for example. Android, that would be just another manufacturer in the same sense as Samsung, for example, and using some build of Android there. But now the partnership that they have with Nokia with Microsoft, sorry, is a lot closer. They have an integration of their services. They, so they have a say. They need to do a couple things. So product leadership, they have to kind of do that right away. Get a good product out the door. And they have to get the app smartphone area. Right, I mean, would you agree? I, yeah, absolutely they do. And I think one of the things that we don't know yet about this relationship is what is Nokia gonna be able to do to differentiate itself on top of the Windows Mobile platform? There was a mention in some of the press articles about the fact that Nokia had gained some agreement from Microsoft to be able to tailor Windows Mobile 7 to their own devices. Frankly, I don't know what that means. And I was a little confused by what Elop reportedly said about not going to Android because he feared commoditization. I don't know how going to Android is worse than going to Windows Mobile, except to the point that you brought up maybe, which is it could be they could have forged a closer working relationship with Microsoft. I don't know. For example, the maps and integration. Certainly that's true. Certainly that's true. Doug, what do you think? I mean, what are you hearing? Facebook post and you've been tweeting a little bit about, but from some of your friends that you're networking with in town and in the industry outside of Silicon Valley, what's the general sentiment about this deal? Good, bad, ugly, neutral, let's wait and see. Well, certainly, I think the general sentiment is embraced by what happened in the stock markets today is negative. So I think that Silicon Valley is accustomed to thinking less of Redmond. And so anybody who would tie up with Microsoft must be crazy. Why wouldn't you tie up with a Google instead of Microsoft? Google's a tech leader. Microsoft is yesterday's news. I'm not stating that for myself, but I am saying that seems to be- Yeah, but Microsoft's highly motivated. Yes. And has a lot of assets. I'm with you, but you're asking, what am I hearing? So the knee jerk reaction is, Microsoft's perceived as a loser and laggard and Nokia looks desperate. That's kind of the general first day review. And that is, and so that's why you see, I think, yes, and certainly that's what I've seen in terms of tweets, it's what's happened in the financial markets. It hasn't exactly met with resounding success. Frankly, from my standpoint, I think it's too early to call. If Windows Phone 7- But the bright spots are, name the top three bright spots that you say are hopefuls, like Key Bullet Points. One, Nokia's strategy of pursuing Mego was too little, too late, unfortunately. So I don't think that would lead them anywhere. So Nokia needed to change, this is a change. So I think that's good. Two, while personally, I prefer Android and iOS. It isn't like the reviews of Windows Phone 7 are that bad. And to be candid, I haven't lived with a Windows Phone 7 phone. So maybe- They've been decent reviews. They haven't been horrible. I mean, there's been some crashes here and there, but Android crashes too. So maybe I need to get a little smarter on that, but at least they've picked a platform that has some receptivity by those who've reviewed it, which I think is good. And also, there are other areas when Nokia and Microsoft can come together. They can certainly join forces now to build a developer ecosystem. And there are other areas in maps, navigation, gaming, advertising, where they could legitimately combine forces. And it might have been harder to do that. Well, certainly would have been harder to do that with Google. I think the advertising is a good angle too. So Maps Gaming, I'm just writing this down on my blog post, but yeah, I think that's good. I mean, those are the key emerging areas. What's your top three bullet points that are on the hopeful side for this deal? Sure. So the first one is that there's a new app ecosystem. So the ones who worked on the older one, meaning the guys who made Gravity, for example, et cetera, must be very upset because their apps are not there anymore and will not be there soon. That said, people who are in the games industry, for example, especially those who work on the Microsoft platform are very happy. Because suddenly- It's one port, now you have a new market. Exactly. And so you're getting, I think Nokia has still got the largest market share phones worldwide. And so these phones are going to become gradually Windows phones capable of running your games. So that's a very good thing. Second thing is that I see that's very reassuring is the burning platform memo. The whole company is a lot more humble now. And I feel a lot more realistic and in touch with the market. You know, I mean, it's not every CEO that'll push a message out there, such as this out there. So there's this perception, I'd say that, like you said, people would want to rally behind the CEO like this. Yes. There's a good sense of hope that you didn't have a few days ago. He's not sticking his head in the sand. He's looking at it straight in the eye and saying, let's take this on. Absolutely. They have the assets. It's not too late. They have a ton of assets. They could pull it off. I mean, they certainly have a huge market share percentage. Absolutely. So I would say- And the third would be gaming? The gaming, absolutely. It's the major asset that they have, I would say. Yeah, so just the one closing point that I'd make was that they still have a good brand. They still have major distribution and that distribution can help push phones. Windows Mobile 7 is gonna have to perform, but there are some early signs that it might. They could get the ecosystem going and Nokia has been down before and Nokia has made big transitions before. I think as many people may know, they used to be a rubber and tire company and they found their way into mobile phones. Just another step. We're here inside theCUBE with Doug and Ramin. Final question, just to kind of wrap it up, is just more of a philosophical one. You guys are both involved in the startup community. Doug, you're advising startups and many boards and you're an entrepreneur and also in Finland, so you're close to the Nokia thing. Could you share your kind of observation and opinion on why Silicon Valley is so hot with mobile right now? You mentioned earlier that Silicon Valley has become the hotbed for mobile innovation. I mean, it's like Apple's here and Google's here primarily, but describe, we live here, right? So describe why and the phenomenon behind Silicon Valley right now and mobile, if you could, and why it's happening, what's some of the dynamics going on, things that you're hearing, anecdotal stories. Can you share? Well, Silicon Valley has always been the center of technology, software, and more recently, the web. And when I say more recently, I mean over the last 30 years, that sort of recently. And when you look at what happened to mobile, 10 years ago mobile was about making a phone call. That was really basically it with a few bells and whistles here and there. With the advent of two and a half G, three G, now four G networks, connectivity to services has become important. With the advent of more powerful processors and mobile devices, software, which previously you thought wouldn't have been able to run on these devices, can run and that plays to Silicon Valley's strengths. And the last thing I'd say is that Silicon Valley knows a wave when it sees it. And certainly mobile is one of those big waves. And so you're getting all the best minds in Silicon Valley. And money. And money, exactly, to focus on mobile. Absolutely, I agree very, very much here. Phone used to be about creating very nice hardware, a nice screen, a longer battery life, a phone that wouldn't break when you drop it down, et cetera. But all of this you can get on pretty much any platform nowadays. The main difference has been the software you can get. And that's been driving basically the differentiation towards what software you can get on the phone, what apps you can get out there. Silicon Valley's the best ecosystem for startups. So in that sense, it's the one that's driving the most innovation on the phones. Yeah, I think I'd agree with you. And I just kind of had my thoughts in saying, you know, Silicon Valley is one of those special places I moved out here 11 years ago this year. And, you know, if you're a startup, there's a lot of risk-taking and there's a lot of capital markets here, the venture capitals. And they nurture innovation from a startup standpoint. But when they see a growing opportunity that's category-creating, like mobile, like cloud, like social, they really double down. They get behind it and they make durable winners. And I'm gonna post a blog post after the show about my comments on the bubble. But if you look at the mega franchises that are coming out of the world these days, Twitter, Facebook, Zenga, I mean, these are, and you know, these kind of companies. Angry Birds. Massive, massive. And, you know, Groupon in Chicago, Angry Birds in Finland. I think Silicon Valley is the heart of innovation, but now they recognize there's a global aspect to it. So, I think, you know, with Apple and Google at the center of it, I think it's just a catalyst of the bright mind. So, great job. And thanks for your comments, Ramin and Doug, on the Nokia Microsoft. Let's, we're gonna follow the story. This is a special report from siliconangle.com, covering all the angles of the Microsoft Nokia partnership. And that's it for now. Have a good day.