I don't think they actually have much choice, what else are they going to do....give up on mobile?
MS aren't really in that bad a position, with RIM dying quickly they should be able to become a firm 3rd choice in the smart-phone and tablet market. The mobile market is very important to them because people aren't very interested in buying desktops these days and the server market is moving to cloud based solutions.
Hmm, I guess I was thinking of "they" as Nokia. Before they got in bed with Microsoft, Nokia was struggling in the smartphone market, but they still dominated the low-end segment. When Nokia first started partnering with Microsoft, they effectively surrendered the entire low-end market and threw away all the investment (and engineering talent) they had put into their in-house smartphones. And the thing they replaced it all with (Windows Phone) was itself floundering in the market. Now they're surrendering their entire phone business to Microsoft. Will they have anything left once this is over? Microsoft could at least do them the courtesy of acquiring the whole company instead of just leaving a mangled corpse for the patent trolls to carve up.
I realize this deal gives Microsoft a more direct line into the phone market, but I think they'll have better luck improving their sales by dumping Windows 8. The phone should complement the desktop. Maybe the phone should even
be the desktop. But the desktop should not be the phone, which is what they are currently pushing.
