Microsoft Faces A Tough Future As Strategy Fails
It became very clear last week how far the market has deserted the old order in the information technology sphere.
Microsoft, struggling to find its own direction, effectively killed off the mobile business built up years back by Nokia.
There was a time when Nokia dominated the mobile phone market. In 2007, its global market share exceeded 50 per cent. At the same time, Microsoft reigned supreme with Office and Windows. It was one of the last moves of Steve Ballmer to buy Nokia and bring it into the Microsoft stable. It had been meant to provide a mobile telephony arm through which Windows Phone could finally take off, Nokia was installing it on the Lumia range of phones whilst the lookalike Windows 8 operating system was due to take hold on PCs.
That strategy is now seen to have hit the rocks badly.
Windows 8 is hurriedly being replaced by Windows 10 and Windows Phone has grabbed less than five per cent of available smartphone sales, outgunned by Google’s market leading Android and the enduring performance of the iPhone. So, last week, current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella effectively declared the Nokia purchase a £7 billion mistake and announced the shutting down of this arm of its business. It is hard to see how any other manufacturer would now want to make Windows phones rather than Androids, and commentators are presently writing obituaries for these as well.
Nadella seemed to confirm this when he subsequently explained that Microsoft would ‘focus on personal computing, reinvention of productivity and business process and building an intelligent cloud platform.’
Modest ambitions indeed compared with those Microsoft pursued a few years back.
