Quote:
Originally Posted by pl001
After the bottom feeders fail, the rest are setting themselves up to be a one-stop digital ecosystem provider. In this sense, Microsoft is in a very strong position.
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Content they have, games and apps they are accumulating, and their services story is clearly second to none. In all the focus on gadgets and plumbing a lot of people forget MS not only has 16 different billion-dollar-a-year businesses, they are top tier in cloud services. Their biggest problem has been their reliance on OEM partners for hardware.
Buying Nokia's resources means they will no longer be hostage to OEMs so if the "partners" giving WinPhone and Win8 half-hearted "support" want to go elsewhere (Android, Firefox OS, or some other linux-based solution) they'll draw a shrug instead of tears.
I suspect MS isn't done shopping.
Dell might be a possibility if the effort to take it private tanks.
Nook.
AMD has long been a solid complement.
A few game development studios.
Netflix.
Conceivably even a movie studio might be a fit.
MS has the tools and the money and there is an open window of opportunity they can leverage their way into the gadget business.