Nokia and Microsoft: Two doomed giants embrace as barbarians circle the gates

What do you do when a bunch of big, aggressive guys tell you that they are going to start giving you a whooping in about 15 minutes time? Either leave the room and make your way to a safe place, or call your biggest, toughest friends and tell them to come over,

pronto

.

Nokia, it seems, is choosing the second option. Few companies are in a more intensely competitive squeeze right now: at the top end of the market they have Apple, Google, Research in Motion and Palm breathing down their neck. And at the low end, their competitive advantage in churning out hundreds of millions of cheap phones for the developing world is being eroded.

While a

pacifist like myself might choose to flee when even the scent of a fight enters the room, Nokia are made of sterner stuff, as we will see later today.

To begin with, they have oodles of cash, thousands of brilliant engineers and marketers, and the best distribution system in the industry, pushing their phones to literally every corner of the earth. And they also have some big, tough friends.

, who they will work with to develop the next generation of hardware and software for mobile devices. And later today, they will announce the details of a partnership with Microsoft,

This all seems a bit desperate to me. Nokia have lost their thought leadership of the market, and although they remain the undisputed king of the castle, smarter and nimbler companies are darting around their feet doing all of the genuinely interesting things in the industry.

Does this description remind you of another prominent technology giant that remains at the top of its industry but has been consistently out-innovated for years? Microsoft, meet Nokia. May this be the beginning of a wonderful friendship.