NewCo

On April 30th MSFT and Barnes and Noble announced a joint venture temporarily called NewCo. The venture will focus on eBooks and the education market. Basically MSFT is putting up $605 million to finance the venture and B&N will do all the work.

What does MSFT get out of all this? Simple, an app store for Win8. MSFT needs to do something to compete with the iFruit company and their incredibly profitable online sales model. As for B&N they are still losing money every month and the big bucks will be very welcome.

MSFT and B&N also settled their ongoing patent battle as part of the deal. Details were not disclosed but I’m in favor of anything that ends some of the endless lawsuits!