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".

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<.