Microsoft May Acquire Nook Tablet Business From Barnes and Noble

whoever57 writes "According to a report in Techcrunch, Microsoft is considering buying out the remaining shares in Nook Media. Microsoft already owns 17% of Nook Media. Documents reveal that Nook Media plans to discontinue selling tablets and transition to a model under which media is distributed through partners." (Also at SlashCloud.)

Comments

The Age Old Story

[MightyMartian]

If you can't grow a market, just buy one.

Re:The Age Old Story

[symbolset]

And then burn it to the ground.

Re:The Age Old Story

[Anonymous Coward]

But the fourth one stayed up! And that's what you're going to get, lad, the shittiest tablet in all of England.

Re:The Age Old Story

[hairyfeet]

God isn't that the truth and the royal bitch is the entire thing comes down to MSFT having no idea what their own strengths are so that aping Apple is hamstringing the entire company.

Look at playsforsure, which to me is a perfect example of MSFT taking a growing market and burning it to the ground trying to be Apple, right before the Zune came out the playsforsure market was growing like mad, you could buy playsforsure devices at every price point, from the $20 gumstix MP3 players at the checkout counter to $300 PMPs, and because there was a rich ecosystem both on the hardware and the software side it was growing thanks to good old competition and with every sale MSFT was getting a cut....what happened? Most likely Ballmer or one of his PHBs said "Its not like Apple, they get a BIG cut and we only get a small one because we aren't in control, we need to fix this!" and promptly destroyed the whole fucking thing.

This is gonna piss off the FOSS advocates when i point this out but what has always sold MSFT tech is how OPEN it was, how you quickly got competition and economies of scale so you have every price point and possible consumer covered. Anybody could write Windows software, any website could sell Windows software, you had all this competition which compared to the locked down centralized control of Apple was appealing, but now Ballmer is shitting all over that because HE wants to be Apple, HE wants a "Microsoft ecosystem" where he gets a 30% cut of everything, and its fucking slaughtering the company because its throwing out everything that MSFT was strong at, plenty of competition and open systems, and leaning on everything they sucked at, making "ecosystems" and tying everything together.

Re:WTF?

[lister king of smeg]

Microsoft bought Nook up when Barns & Noble stood up to them saying take it to court of bugger off. So rather then risk loosing in court and in turn having all of the android device manufacturers turning on them, they tried to save face and "partnered" with Barns and Noble, who being primarily book sellers not tech people weren't familiar with the Microsoft motto "embrace extend extinguish".

Video game consoles, for counterexample

[tepples]

If "what people really want is selection", then why do people buy video game consoles instead of PCs? PCs have a far larger selection of video games and other applications than consoles due to the far lower overhead and the far less strict developer qualifications. Why would people want selection on a tablet but not on a TV?

Re:Next Up

[Frosty Piss]

Vocational collage

collage?

Yes. Simular to Basket Weaving 101.

Re:Next Up

[tripleevenfall]

We have two companies admitting failure here, B&N and MSFT.

It's too bad about the Nook, they are nice devices. Nook should have won over Kindle, but B&N didnt have the foresight years ago to get into the everything business the way Amazon did, so they were always going to be muscled out of the market.

Microsoft on the other hand will probably just try to make money off Nook's patent portfolio, given they have failed with their "Surface" (which, near as I can tell, is some kind of break-dancing tutor device.)

Re:Next Up

[hairyfeet]

I don't know why you got modded down since buying companies and tech and shitting all over them and making them worthless? Been their MO for several years now. Zune, Kin, Sidekick, killing the profitable playsforsure for the DOA Zune market, if its one thing MSFT is good at its taking a lesser player on the field and totally ruining it. I'm shocked that Amazon's stock didn't go up more at the announcement as nook has been the only competition they've had in eReaders and MSFT will kill them dead, most likely by getting rid of the cheap hardware and going "herps derp, they'll buy a $1000 MSFT Surface cuz of the Nook, we're special! herpa de derpa". because MSFT is gonna sell at Apple prices or die dammit!...of course it looks like the "or die dammit!" is what is gonna happen in reality.

Poor MSFT shareholders, it must be frustrating as hell to watch the company be run off the rails by an incompetent CEO that has the biggest shareholder as his BFF so no matter how he shits on the company he can't be fired. I've seen many saying that "when things get bad enough Bill will come back!"...no he won't, Jobs had his massive ego tied into his company, Bill has cashed out enough stock he could live like a God if MSFT burned to the ground. More likely he'll quietly cash out and walk away,he doesn't care about his old company anymore, its nothing like Jobs and Apple.

Re:Next Up

[PCM2]

So Nook was a failure for B&N? Sure, maybe it's not giving Amazon as much of a run for its money as B&N hoped. But then again, just what does B&N think it's going to do if it gives up on Nook now? Sell magazines and coffee? Good luck on that >cough< Borders >cough<.

Re:Awesome guys....

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh..that would be two sentences long friend. Why is MSFT interested? iTunes. What are the ups and downs? The ups are the existing customers and the down is they will all be gone in less than 2 years as MSFT hamfistedly tries to force them into a poorly made MSFT ecosystem that costs more than the more popular Apple and Google offerings.

There ya go Motard, I have covered the entire thing in two sentences. Anybody who says anything other than "Don't buy until we see where they are going with this" can be argued to be a fanboy as the track record on MSFT and consumer products is beyond abysmal, Zune,Kin,Sidekick,Zune market, WinRT, winPhone 7, their track record is poorly thought out products that kill any fan base of the product they buy because they just don't know how to make a compelling product or service in the consumer space.

Re:Next Up

[Darinbob]

Nook had a lot of advantages too. Epub format so you could get books from other vendors (not sure how hard that was) and back them up somewhere for safety, whereas kindle prefers a proprietary format. Nook had a lot of features before Kindle too, like pdf and book lending. Amazon has taken the step of recalling books with DRM, which I haven't heard about B&N doing yet.

And face it, Amazon is a far bigger faceless entity than B&N. If you like real book stores then B&N wins.

Re:Next Up

[Cinder6]

I agree that it'll be a loss for consumers if the Nook disappears. However...

I've owned (or currently own) three Kindles, one Nook (the glow light version), and the new Kobo that got slashvertised here a few weeks ago. As I've posted before, Amazon simply has the best platform of the three (I haven't tried others). It's ridiculously easy to sideload books wirelessly, without jailbreaking, to all of your Kindles at once. More importantly, Kindle will sync the location of sideloaded books. Third-party publishers, such as Baen, already offer MOBI files, so you don't even need to use Calibre.

The only other eBook vendor I know of that syncs sideloaded stuff is Apple, and they don't have a dedicated eReader, and sideloading is a little bit trickier than the Kindle. I haven't checked out Google; how are they in this arena?

I've also found Amazon to be the cheapest, at least for books I actually want to read. Two books on my shortlist, A Fire Upon the Deep and The Last Colony, are both $2 more on the Kobo store. A couple dollars here and there add up. (My solution right now is to buy on Amazon and convert it for the Kobo.)

What makes it all so frustrating is that Amazon has the worst hardware of the three. It isn't that it's bad, it's that it's very utilitarian. The Nook has the best-feeling reader, while the Kobo has the best software (their text options are downright great), screen, and backlight.