Moody's: This Nokia-Microsoft Thing May Not Work

The financial ratings agencies are weighing in on the Microsoft-Nokia plan on smartphones and finding it wanting.

According to Parmy Olson's Disruptors blog at Forbes, "Moody's has just cut Nokia's credit rating because of a 'significant degree of uncertainty' about its transition to running Microsoft's Windows Phone 7."

The Moody's cut follows a similar move by Standard & Poor's last month.

On the other hand, Goldman Sachs has upgraded Nokia's shares, and, as we reported, IDC projects that Microsoft's Windows Phone platform will leapfrog Apple's iOS and BlackBerry to take second place behind Google's Android platform by 2015. Color us skeptical of predictions that far ahead, but Gartner analysts also recently arrived at conclusions similar to IDC's.

I'm not going to say I'm swayed by Moody's or Standard & Poor's negative attitude -- or by Goldman Sachs' positive attitude, for that matter. The bloom is off the rose as far as how good the ratings agencies and big-name Wall Street firms are at predicting anything. After all, look how well they did rating the mortgage-related investments that collapsed and helped bring on financial armageddon a few years ago -- and that was much more in their wheelhouse than predicting mobile market share.

Nonetheless, the dueling analyst predictions just underscore that there's a lot still to be decided in this multi-horse smartphone race.

Posted by Scott Bekker on April 08, 2011 at 11:58 AM