Microsoft stuffs $300m into Nook, bolts B&N app to Windows 8 Microsoft has made a big push into ereaders today by pumping $300m into the makers of the Nook tablet - bookseller and Amazon arch-rival Barnes & Noble. The cash will buy Microsoft a 17.5 per cent stake in a new Nook subsidiary of B&N, dubbed NewCo until a name is decided. Redmond also announced that the Nook collaboration …
Actually the main problem Vole bought its way out of was almost certain defeat in court. Patents (or at least the threat of patent litigation) are far more valuable than software to a company that can't write (or rather, assimilate) decent software. Usually Microsoft's victims just roll over, but not in this case, so it did the only other thing it could to protect those bogus patents, by ensuring they weren't challenged in court: they essentially bribed the defendant.
Personally I can't understand how this can even be legal. Surely the regulators can see the obviously anticompetitive nature of this "deal", and the nefarious reasons behind it.
IMO all patent claims should be required to be proved in court, or the claimant suffers the legal consequences (fraud, extortion). Any extra-legal "deals" forged without the legal establishment of those claims should be overturned, and the victims compensated.
In fact the entire premise of "out of court settlements" is basically legalised bribery to evade justice, and as such should be abolished.
"Windows Phone has 10% of the apps of Android and iOS."
That's okay. 90% of Apps are crap anyway. So long as the 10% of useful ones are present and the 90% of those it doesn't are the ones that people haven't bothered with, it will all work out. And sure, if there's a decent project that already does what you want, why re-invent the wheel? *shrug*
The value is in their ebook store more than any IP, especially since their ePub DRM is easy to strip. Microsoft negotiated from a position of weakness - an IP lawsuit about to backfire badly and a huge hole in their ability to implement the already announced Win8 ebook plans.
For a change I doubt they're getting the good end of this deal. Win8 desperately needs the joint venture to be a success.
This time they didn't even wait to get in front of a judge so I guess B&N had some really dirty stuff to unload in court, something so embarrassing that Microsoft did not want the world to find out about.
MS did not buy their way into ebook readers market, they bought their way out from a disaster in court, all this for a paltry 300m$. If it were for me, US DoJ should require this judicial saga to continue.
>MS did not buy their way into ebook readers market, they bought their way out from a disaster in court
Nope, they secured themselves a healthy stake in only ebooks publishers like - publishers who are still laughing in the face of fruity visions for publishing, but who only really had the alternative of being Kindle's slightly better remunerated bitches until today.
"This time they didn't even wait to get in front of a judge....." Neatly ignoring all the times that the M$ patents have won before going to court. There is no indication that B&N had any better arguments than all those companies that have already folded when faced with a court date with the M$ patent lawyers, which kinda implies M$ were actually targetting the Nook and using the carrot-and-stick approach. For B&N the stick ws the patent action, which would have tied them up in court and drained resources, and a whole bunch of carrots in $300m, the escape from standing alone and being gradually ground down by Amazon and Apple, and the chance to latch onto what is still the most common OS. You h8rs really need to try thinking a bit more about this whole deal.
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Microsoft stuff is fairly usable these days (Certainly more so than Apple/Gnome 3/Unity)
I use Android but I think it is total junk really.
It is particularly bad at integrating properly with the OS running on your computer.
(Hate web apps - want it to use proper integrated OS features same way as WP7 and iOS (on Mac) do. Android should integrate well with Linux.
(Dunno why they use MTP of all protocols (Why not CIFS) poor Bluetooth implimentation no proper native API)
Too much is just the lazy way out.
Tizen looks like it could be good (WebOS seemed to work well).
Android is just an adware delivery mechanism.
"Microsoft has made a big push into.. Barnes & Noble. The cash will buy Microsoft a 17.5 per cent stake in a new Nook subsidiary of B&N .. As part of the deal, Microsoft has wiped away its patent disputes with the bookseller .. In its statement today Microsoft specifically signalled its intentions to make sure the company capitalises on B&N's strength in college publishing".
How is this any different than what Tony Sopranos friends used get up to?
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