BARCELONA - Intel president and chief executive Paul Otellini on Wednesday expressed aggravation over Nokia's decision to make the move to Microsoft's Windows Phone platform, though he said he understood why Nokia did what it did.
"I understand why they did it, and I guess if I were in [Nokia president Stephen Elop's] position, I would have made a similar call," Otellini said during a presentation here at Mobile World Congress. "But you change your company when you do these things, and you change peoples' lives. One shouldn't do this capriciously; [it] needs to be thought out."
Otellini appeared on a panel with Yahoo's Carol Bartz, Cisco's John Chambers, and Softbank's CEO Masayoshi Son. When asked what he said when Elop called him to break the news, Otellini joked that he "used a word that Carol has often used," referring to Bartz's sometimes colorful language.
"I have actually been very good" lately, Bartz retorted.
Joking aside, with the Nokia-Microsoft decision, Otellini said "you're seeing the last fully integrated phone manufacturers become horizontal, [which is] exactly what you saw in the PC market."
People focus on what they're good at and that's happening very rapidly in the handset market, Otellini continued. Over time, however, you'll see more innovation and more players enter the market.
Nokia and Microsoft have been a major topic here at MWC, and it appears that the only people happy with the deal are Nokia and Microsoft. During a keynote presentation last night, Google chief Eric Schmidt also expressed his disappointment and said that he would've liked to see Nokia adopt the Android platform.
It was one year ago at this conference that Intel and Nokia appeared onstage to introduce the MeeGo platform. Earlier this week, Intel said it was still committed to MeeGo and released the MeeGo tablet experience to developers. Qt also chimed in to say that it was not dead yet.