Earlier today, the world's largest phone maker announced a deal with the second-largest search engine, a company which also operates America's most popular email service.
The blogosphere yawned, then clicked Bury.
Yet the deal between Finland's Nokia and Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo is huge. Yahoo will, over the next year, become the default search and email on Nokia's phones, which outnumber Apple's more than ten to one worldwide. In return, Nokia's Ovi brand of maps will become Yahoo's back end for both mobile and desktop maps. The maps move is easy: Yahoo already uses maps from Navteq, which Nokia bought for $8 billion in 2007.
The two companies haven't spelled out who's paying who what, but the dual-announcement nature of the deal suggests it's some form of quid pro quo than cash changing hands. (Note to Yahoo PR: Take a tip from the Google Blog and dole out the news in portions. You could have announced the messaging deal one day and the maps the next, drawing twice as much coverage and making it less confusing for journalists who get sleepy after the second bullet point.)
Yahoo and Nokia, in the USA, are seen as tired giant also-rans. "Two brands that have lost relevance seeking to reclaim it," analyst Michael Gartenberg typed this morning. Yahoo Mail, with 600 million members and more American users than Hotmail, AOL or Gmail, isn't irrelevant. It's just unsexy.
What's not clear is whether Yahoo's apps will sell Nokia phones, versus how many people will skip over them to install Gmail. My first reaction is that there are one too many brands in the picture -- Nokia, Ovi, and Yahoo. As a buyer, I'd feel best about buying a Yahoo phone with no additional branding. Because whenever I see the brand logos start stacking on a gadget, I brace myself for remove-the-battery reboots.