Microsoft Corp yesterday announced a $600m stock investment in wireless operator, Nextel Communications Inc, to develop a co- branded version of its MSN portal through which Nextel will offer customized web services to its subscribers. Nextel will use the cash influx, which was set at $36 per share, to add additional services to the MSN portal, such as the ability to access billing information on-line, as well as to expand its national network in the US, and fund system development and expansion in other countries. As well as customized services, users will also be able to access all the same content, email, calendar, address book contact and other web-based data, that users can get from the MSN portal site today.
What’s new is that Nextel will offer the service, which it is calling Nextel Online, on top of a range of internet ready cellular phones, currently being developed by Motorola Inc and due for roll-out at the end of this year. As part of the announcement, the carrier said it would work with Redmond to help the software maker define the necessary specifications for its microbrowser technology, but the first iterations of the product and service won’t actually use Microsoft’s technology. Instead, Nextel will incorporate phone.com Inc’s microbrowser instead. Microsoft’s browser is due some time in the middle of this year.
Motorola will manufacture a range of cellular phones, for different market segments, a spokesperson for Nextel said. The carrier will trial the service in six cities – Washington DC, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Greensborough, North Carolina – later this year and depending on the result, Nextel Online will be rolled out commercially throughout 2000. The phones will cost around $299 and will include the browser and any necessary software, although the spokesperson declined to say how it would charge for the services. More details will available at launch.
Jonathan Usher, Microsoft’s telecom industry marketing manager, said the move is part of a broad effort on Microsoft’s part to work with service providers as they build out new services to consumers. And a key part of enabling access to services is via wireless networks, he said. This is the first announcement Redmond has made of its kind, but Usher didn’t rule out other, similar partnerships in the future. Obviously, each deal will be different, as each service provider will want to customize their service slightly differently from the next, but we fully expect to announce other relationships going forward.
Last year, the software giant announced a joint venture with Qualcomm Inc, to develop a service called Wireless Knowledge, which enables service providers and carriers to let their mobile users wirelessly connect into the corporate network to download MS Exchange data.
