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" Today Microsoft turned its alliance with Finnish cellular giant Nokia into a marriage, announcing the acquisition of Nokia&amp;#039;s handset and services businesses for $7.2 billion. The two companies have been tied together since 2011, when former Microsoft executive Stephen Elop became Nokia&amp;#039;s CEO, then promptly replaced the handsetmaker&amp;#039;s aging Symbian operating system with Microsoft&amp;#039;s relatively new Windows Phone OS. But both companies have since struggled to gain market share in the mobile space, drowned out by devices from Apple and Samsung running iOS and Google&amp;#039;s Android operating systems. This is the second time in the last two years that a large software and services company has bought a mobile hardware company\u2014in 2012 Google purchased Motorola&amp;#039;s handset business. And it&amp;#039;s unclear if this type of consolidation is good for customers or even the businesses themselves. There&amp;#039;s no evidence to support the idea that these mergers will reduce customer choice. There are currently four mobile OSs available to customers right now: Apple&amp;#039;s iOS, Google&amp;#039;s Android, Microsoft&amp;#039;s Windows Phone, and RIM&amp;#039;s BlackBerry OS. Any reduction in that number probably will be the result of RIM&amp;#039;s collapse rather than industry consolidation. A Microsoft-owned Nokia also probably won&amp;#039;t reduce the number of handsets and tablets it produces (although you might see the Surface eventually marketed under the Nokia name). Simply, there&amp;#039;s no real benefit to either entity in limiting customer choice of an OS that has been a tough sell to begin with. As far as the businesses themselves, owning the product pipeline from software to hardware to services has always been the Apple business model, and it&amp;#039;s a model that has clearly worked out well for that company. But the most nimble company in the mobile space these days seems to be Samsung, which floods the market with products in every category, and plays fast and loose with the Android operating system (and even the Windows Phone OS\u2014Samsung still maintains a portfolio of products that support Microsoft&amp;#039;s mobile operating system). What this all amounts to is two big companies holding hands and officially jumping into the void together as one. Until today Nokia could have backed out of its agreement with Microsoft and developed handsets using Android. Likewise, Microsoft could have declared Windows Phone an expensive and interesting failed experiment and retrenched as a desktop software, gaming, and cloud services company (unlikely, but, hey, how much money does any company want to throw down a hole?). Now that they&amp;#039;re joined at the hip, neither company has an easy exit strategy. Speaking of exit strategies, this merger has produced far more speculation about Elop&amp;#039;s future than that of his company. He is now the front-runner to succeed current Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who plans to step down within a year. If Elop becomes Microsoft&amp;#039;s CEO, the company would essentially be picking from within its own executive roster rather than looking outside for fresh ideas. But Microsoft hasn&amp;#039;t really been lacking fresh ideas of late\u2014if anything, the company has been throwing too many new ideas at consumers. If Microsoft is to remain relevant over the next decade, it needs a clear vision of what it, as a company, wants to be. In the 1970s former CEO Bill Gates claimed that the purpose of Microsoft was to put a computer on every desk. It seemed astoundingly ambitious at the time, but it was largely accomplished a decade ago. If Elop is to become the next CEO, he needs to figure out what comes next. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a9434/by-buying-nokia-microsoft-doubles-down-on-windows-phone-15880233/>