Investopedia: Can Nokia And Microsoft Recapture Their Magic?

Human beings are nostalgic creatures, and "retro" often plays well. Millions of people enthusiastically played the Pac-Man doodle that Google (Nasdaq:GOOG) offered up on that game's 30th anniversary. More recently, the SyFy channel ran a B-movie reuniting Tiffany and Debbie Gibson and over 2 million people actually chose to watch it.

So then, will the union of Nokia (NYSE:NOK) and Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) bring customers and investors back to the glory days when these were among the leaders in the tech world, or is this just a Wall Street version of "Mega Python versus Gatoroid"?    

Nokia Looking To Shake Things Up 

Nokia's new CEO, Stephen Elop, is clearly not pleased with how prior management of Nokia effectively painted the company into a corner. True, the company still has the number one worldwide share of cellphones, but the company has virtually no momentum in the smartphone market and has been effectively no threat at all to Apple (Nasdaq:AAPL), Motorola (NYSE:MMI), Research In Motion (Nasdaq:RIMM) or the Taiwanese and Koreans. In fact, Mr. Elop recently wrote in a memo that Nokia was essentially "standing on a burning platform" and had to make major changes to survive.

Going With Another Also-Ran? 

Instead of waiting to see whether the company's new Symbian platform could hold the answer to a recovery, Elop has chosen to ally the company with Microsoft instead. In essence, the two companies will combine assets and know-how to jointly develop new smartphone technology. This is hardly a rerun of the WinTel duopoly that was so successful in the 80s and 90s.

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