Nokia Insider: Nokia Ovi Maps will replace Bing Maps

Search Engine Land has had an opportunity to speak to “a person with close connections to Nokia” who claims to have more information about the Nokia/ Microsoft deal regarding maps.

According to this insider Nokia will not merely be enhancing Bing Maps, but completely replacing the back end with their own solution.

According to the report “… Nokia Maps would effectively replace almost everything that Microsoft had developed over the past several years in terms of the Bing Maps infrastructure.”

While most Europeans would rejoice, given Bing Map’s apparent deficits on the continent, Search Engine Land notes Microsoft has invested heavily in their own Maps service, which may now be discarded and make many jobs at Microsoft redundant.

Of course Microsoft being a software company was likely rather uncomfortable with the high level of investment needed to create high quality maps, especially in parts of the world where their Bing market share is low and short term return is unlikely, and may be more than happy to off-load this task to Nokia. We have also been pretty wowed by some of Nokia’s Ovi maps recently.

Of course this in some ways make Microsoft as dependent on Nokia as Nokia will be on Microsoft, which is probably more a good than a bad thing, given the importance of their relationship.

Read more at Search Engine Land here.