Microsoft, Nokia, and the hole in the wall

In the classic film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the titular heroes step over the line one too many times robbing the trains of the Union Pacific Railroad and its owner, E.H. Harriman. Harriman hires a “super posse” of famous lawmen to hunt down Butch and Sundance dead or alive.

I couldn’t help thinking about that film while reading about Nokia’s pact with Microsoft to base future Nokia smartphones on Windows Phone 7. Like the titular heroes of the film, Nokia and Microsoft were both simultaneously feared and loved when they ruled as masters of their industries. And like Butch and Sundance, both ticked off E.H. Harriman one too many times.

For the purposes of this analogy, picture Microsoft as Sundance and Nokia as Butch. The “super posse” is Apple and its iOS platform of iPhones and iPads, pursuing the gang relentlessly into the hills.

Eventually the two are pinned down in an exposed area at the top of a ravine overlooking a river far below. Butch recognises their peril and readies to shoot it out while Sundance, always thinking, suggests they jump into the river. Butch refuses to comply, revealing that he can’t swim. Sundance laughs at this: “Are you crazy,” he says, “the fall’s gonna kill you.”

They tie their arms together and jump, both recognising this is the only chance they have, and Butch in particular hoping Sundance will stop him drowning.

Similarly, Nokia admitted last year that it couldn’t swim when it hired Stephen Elop to come over from Microsoft and be its CEO. It recognised even then that Symbian was never going to be a dominant – or even competitive – smartphone platform, and what’s more it didn’t have the skills in-house to do anything about it. Perhaps, it thought, Microsoft did?

Microsoft, for its part, has been trying to get someone – anyone – to take it seriously as a mobile platform vendor for well over a decade, with no success. Remember Windows CE? That’s how long Microsoft’s been trying to get into the game.

Windows Phone 7 was supposed to be a break from the past and a brave new world of functionality, but doesn’t feature such basic things as multitasking or cut-and-paste. Sure, neither did iOS when it first appeared. That was nearly four years ago.

Both Microsoft and Nokia have promised and not delivered, promised and not delivered, over and over and over again, for years. Even now, with the iPad revitalising the long-moribund category of “tablet” computing, Microsoft admits Windows Phone 7 is not a suitable tablet platform. For the sake of my analogy, E.H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad is everyone who has wanted a decent smartphone for the past decade and a half. We’re the ones who set Apple’s super posse on the trail.

So the two have tied themselves together and plunged into the ravine, hoping for the best. We’ll see how that goes.

Butch and Sundance, for their part, survived the fall and fled to Bolivia, where they gained a certain degree of repute as bank robbers. Forced from their comfort zone, they had at least found their niche. They were happy.

I don’t want to spoil the ending of the film for you if you haven’t seen it yet – and I strongly recommend you do, it’s brilliant. But for the sake of this column, imagine Google, and Android, as the Bolivian Army.

Matthew JC. Powell couldn’t squeeze BlackBerry into the analogy. Suggestions to mjcp@me.com