• Michael
• On September 26, 2017

Nadella advised Ballmer not to buy Nokia’s phone business

Microsoft’s current mobile strategy could be different if the company didn’t changed its CEO from Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadella. Apparently, Steve Ballmer wanted to purchase Nokia in order to build a strong ecosystem in phones, while the current CEO didn’t want to be “chasing competitors’ taillights”. However, most of the votes were in favor of the acquisition.

Satya Nadella writes in his book (commenting the Nokia deal):

I voted no, I did not get why the world needed the third ecosystem in phones, unless we changed the rules … But it was too late to regain the ground we had lost. We were chasing our competitors’ taillights.

Instead of continuing the small, but steady growth with Lumia, Microsoft stopped making phones, wrote off the Nokia acquisition and left 18,000 people without a job.

As explained several times already, Microsoft now wants to be in the phone business only when it has something differentiating. The company is currently developing a mobile device running a new version of Windows 10 – Andromeda OS, but this project won’t come to the market by the second half of 2018.

Source: Thurrott