Another Bad Decision By MSFT

Last Thursday, Microsoft ended its brief fling with Android, dumping the Nokia X smartphone and fleeing back into the arms of its beloved Windows.

That Microsoft had made cuts following its acquisition of Nokia wasn’t unexpected; after all, the deal brought with it 32,000 Nokia employees. What wasn’t known was how many of those employees Microsoft was willing to give up, and, likewise, what this would mean for Microsoft’s strategic direction.

Satya Nadella’s memo provides the overall strategic direction for the move—necessary, he said, to “realign the workforce” to provide a “clear focus” for the merged company. But Stephen Elop, the executive vice president of Microsoft’s Devices and Services Business, provides the clearest look at what this means for the products you know and buy.

The short answer? Aside from the fewer number of employees designing, selling, and supporting Nokia products, not much. “..[W]e will continue our efforts to bring iconic tablets to market in ways that complement our OEM partners, power the next generation of meetings & collaboration devices and thoughtfully expand Windows with new interaction models,” Elop writes. “With a set of changes already implemented earlier this year in these teams, this means there will be limited change for the Surface, Xbox hardware, PPI/meetings or next generation teams.”