This year’s Mobile World Conference started on Valentine’s Day 2011, possibly landing some of the technologists attending the expo today in hot water with their sweeties—but when it comes to the industry, it is indeed a day for love. As we’ve already know Nokia and Microsoft have announced their joining in a wide-reaching smartphone venture. Today we get a window into the possible blissful future of the Nokia-Microsoft deal.

A great deal of the speculation surrounding the deal has been stirred by the huge negative reaction by Nokia’s fan base and the pundits. After all, Microsoft is involved and they’re a huge power within the software industry and are still trying to penetrate into the smartphone market. Ideally, both Microsoft and Nokia want to make their mark against both Google and Apple and together they expect  both better distribution and a stronger developer platform.

As we reported on Friday, one of Nokia’s biggest problems has been a lack of developers and Stephen Elop began to address during his press conference at MWC. Engadget has an excellent live-glob of his speech,

Question is whether Nokia would prefer to be the sole supplier of Windows Phone devices.

Elop: “Great question. What’s best for Nokia is an environment with multiple competitors creating an ecosystem.” Pretty straightforward — he doesn’t want to be the only maker of Windows Phone 7 devices.

“That being said, as we achieve our first priority of beating Android, we’ll be competing within the Windows Phone ecosystem, and that’s fair.”

Though Microsoft is the primary supplier of dev tools for Windows Phone, Elop says that Nokia will be making a significant investment in providing its own value-add to that developer environment.

“It has been the case that within Nokia, our development environments have been somewhat scattered within four areas.

“It has been discussed that Nokia plus Microsoft together have an extraordinarily strong intellectual property portfolio.”

The deal between Microsoft and Nokia is a really fun one because both corporations come to the table with software and hardware. According to Elop, he doesn’t want to be the sole-generator of Windows Phone 7 hardware; but they will probably be taking Windows as the OS and wedding their own abstraction layers on top of that. So, we’ll be seeing already well-known Nokia-hardware, running Microsoft-software and use that to spur interest in the developer community.

Apart, WP7 and Symbian have been somewhat left out of the running when it comes to developers and they’ve been a little bit lacking in apps. In fact, when it comes to over all apps Google Android and Apple iOS are often the primary two seen whenever going to a download page. Point in fact, games like Angry Birds still doesn’t have a Windows Phone 7 version and if the Nokia-Microsoft deal is going to do anything good for the two companies they will really have to woo developers.

That “significant investment in providing its own value-add to the developer that environment” will be instrumental in bringing the two companies further into the app market.