Anytime a blogger uses the word vague “above the fold” on their blog, you pretty much can be assured they don’t know anything about anything .  Greg Sterling sat down with someone close to Nokia and says:

However my lunch companion argued unequivocally that Nokia Maps would effectively replace almost everything that Microsoft had developed over the past several years in terms of the Bing Maps infrastructure. This was shocking because Microsoft has invested hundreds of millions of dollars (if not billions) in creating a viable competitor to Google Maps. Most recently the company has been promoting its roll out of new hi-resolution aerial imagery on a global basis.

So what does this mean?  Well first Microsoft already uses Nokia/Navteq for most of their mapping, no big change there.  Microsoft has already what might be the best aerial photography in the business, so why would you replace something that is awesome with something that isn’t?  What about their API?  Could be, I’ve never been a fan of the Bing Maps APIs, so maybe this is Microsoft taking their aerials and Bird’s Eye to the Nokia Maps API and branding it as Bing Maps.  That would be a good mix because Nokia Maps is actually a good API, just one that doesn’t get used by anyone.  Problem solved!

But wait right?!?!?!  Nokia Maps?  Wasn’t that called Ovi?  Not anymore, the marketing team at Nokia has gotten their sanity back and killed the Ovi  name.  This means that Nokia has decided their name actually has value and they’ll use it in their products.  Now if Microsoft would just realize that Bing means zip and brand their stuff as Microsoft, everything will be back to normal.  Or better  yet, they could just rename the product “Not Google Maps” which is really how most people know it anyway.

Bottom line is that Microsoft loves drama, feeds on drama and wouldn’t know what to do unless there was drama.  Thus Bing Maps powered by Nokia is just something to get us through the next 3 months until the marketing dorks in Redmond get crazy again and start thinking of new ideas to waste time and money on.