Ballmer's Retirement Leaves Nokia High and Dry

By SemiWiki

August 28, 2013

It looks to me as if Ballmer's planned resignation from Microsoft is going to leave Nokia high and dry without an operating system. Because any successor to Ballmer will cancel Windows Phone which has managed to take Microsoft's penetration in smartphones from 5% before it had a serious partnership with Nokia all the way to...err...4% today. Except for Nokia, all the other handset partners have pretty much transitioned from Windows Phone to Android or, perhaps in the future, Firefox or Tizen (a joint Samsung/Intel mobile OS).

There seems to be increasing evidence that Microsoft planned to acquire Nokia at the start of this year, that Nokia was ready to do it, Ballmer was ready to do it but the Microsoft board, or perhaps Bill Gates personally, vetoed it in February. Up until that point, Nokia had increasingly focused on Windows Phone and killed off all the internal competing operating systems even when phones that were on-track to be very successful (winning awards, with people from some countries going to other countries to be able to get their hands on one etc).

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