More fuel to the "Xbox division split" idea

[charlesr]

http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2014/05/05/buffett-leery-social-media-stocks-ipos/

Gates said he would back the decision if the new CEO made a move to split Xbox from MS. I'm not sure what the implications for long term Xbox would be though, so I'm sure people much more knowledgeable than me will comment on that.

[Brad]

... And some less knowledgeable...

Cannot be anything but disastrous for X Box if ms sold the brand. Luckily they won't.

[briareos_kerensky]

If MS would spin-off one of their divisions, it could be the phone/tablet division to Nokia, which they recently acquired.

[Guts]

Why would MS sell the phone division to Nokia when they just acquired it from Nokia in the first place?

[briareos_kerensky]

Not sell, but give that division to Nokia to manage as they please. Everything remains under the MS umbrella, but phones/tablets would be more independent from other MS products. I'm not too up to date on the mobile market, but if I'm not mistaken, Nokia was able to emerge from some serious debt.

[EvilBoris]

Has that comment not been mis interpreted?

Journalist : Would you support a decision made by the new CEO?

Bill Gates : Yes

[nonny]

Yes. If you listen to the whole interview he merely points out he would support the new CEO on matters. It's taken completely out of context.

[Brad]

Has that comment not been mis interpreted?

Journalist : Would you support a decision made by the new CEO?

Bill Gates : Yes

Because the internet!

[Duncan James Waugh]

Not sell, but give that division to Nokia to manage as they please. Everything remains under the MS umbrella, but phones/tablets would be more independent from other MS products. I'm not too up to date on the mobile market, but if I'm not mistaken, Nokia was able to emerge from some serious debt.

Nokia never had debt. They have always had huge cash reserves, until the disaster that was Elop and the MS takeover. The mobile division of Nokia is now wholly owned by MS.

[briareos_kerensky]

Nokia never had debt. They have always had huge cash reserves, until the disaster that was Elop and the MS takeover. The mobile division of Nokia is now wholly owned by MS.

Really? I was under the impression that Elop turned the company around, if not from debt, from being a relevant (to the Android/iOS crowd) player in the mobile field.

[Duncan James Waugh]

The complete opposite.

Nokia never had a bad quarter until his move to Windows Phone, sales went through the toilet after his little press release, shares tumbled overnight, Finland's government held some emergency meetings concerned about the direction he was taking the company in (Nokia accounted for 3-4% of the country's GDP).

Nokia had continued volume growth year on year in the smartphone sector until the move to Windows Phone and in his entire time he never managed to get sales back up to Symbian levels. The meagre profits he eventually managed after a good few years of loss making were driven through asset stripping the company - selling off the headquarters for a short term cash injection, one-off cash payouts from the MS side and culling tens of thousands of jobs and manufacturing plants. Several years on and Nokia's shares were worth half what they were before he took the company down.

Elop killed Nokia, plain and simple, and I think the motivations of him and those around him were perfectly clear throughout.

[QualityChimp]

It's not purely his fault and the decision to go to Windows Mobile is it? I would have thought changing market conditions were also a factor?

They were still pushing Symbian for far too long and, if anything, they should've been pushing WIndows Mobile a lot earlier, instead of fannying around with that Linux MeeGo. They would've been ahead of the game then, instead of trailing behind.

Plus their odd handset choices meant they were trailing BlackBerry in the business sector and the iPhone everywhere else.

Like Kodak, being too slow to adapt and too confident in its product lead to its downfall.

[Duncan James Waugh]

It's not purely his fault and the decision to go to Windows Mobile is it? I would have thought changing market conditions were also a factor?

In my opinion without Elop Nokia would never have adopted Windows Phone.

They were still pushing Symbian for far too long

Symbian sales continued to grow consistently until the press release from Elop, the relaunched line with Symbian^3 had been a huge sales success.

and, if anything, they should've been pushing WIndows Mobile a lot earlier, instead of fannying around with that Linux MeeGo.

Windows Mobile was the biggest failure of any smartphone OS in the history of the handset industry. Windows Phone's (seperate OS) sales figures were even worse at the time, manufacturer's were dropping it all over the place. The OS was technically backward which was why when people left Symbian they went to Android not Windows Phone and it set the tech back in Nokia's handsets by several years. Prior to the Nokia sellout Windows Mobile/Phone did almost zero business outside of North America, it was a bonehead move, which was reflected in the overnight slump in share price that went on for months.

Regarding Linux Meego, the N9 which was only sold in a few select countries and had no carrier discount, and it managed to outsell the entire Lumia line alone in the first year of Nokia's Windows Phone adoption.

Not to mention that thanks to Qt it was possible to write an application once and then have it run on both Symbian and Meego, making it easy for customers to move between the two OSes and retain all their applications. This was gaining huge attention from the developer community. I can tell you that the move to Windows Phone burned a lot of developer good will.

Plus their odd handset choices meant they were trailing BlackBerry in the business sector and the iPhone everywhere else.

This simply wasn't true. Before that press release (which overnight killed sales) Symbian was selling over 10million units a month, outperforming both Android and iPhone. It took Android an entire year after Symbian sales stopped to catchup with the active Symbian install base.

[Duncan James Waugh]

In fact some graphs might help:

[Duncan James Waugh]

Just to point out that first blue bump labelled First Lumia Phone = ostensibly a Microsoft loan (it was a cash injection but locked the company into later royalty payments). And second bump = sale of HQ.