Microsoft Completes $7.2 Billion Acquisition of Nokia Devices and Services Business

Microsoft today officially announced the closure of $7.2 billion purchase of Nokia Devices and Services business. Microsoft aims to remake the mobile market with this smart and strategic acquisition as it has now become the second largest mobile phone maker.

With the proper acquisition and takeover of Nokia, Microsoft has beefed up its capabilities on the mobile front. And while it has yet to catch up with rivals like Apple and Google, it is still getting there slow and steady. The fact remains though that Microsoft is a leader in matters of software manufacture. 

“Today we welcome the Nokia Devices and Services business to our family. The mobile capabilities and assets they bring will advance our transformation,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “Together with our partners, we remain focused on delivering innovation more rapidly in our mobile-first, cloud-first world.”

According to Stephen Elop, Microsoft has literally killed two birds with one stone. It is now both a product and service maker. This twin ability makes it a market phenomenon alright. 

“The opportunity for Microsoft to be both a devices and services company, so that it can deliver the complete proposition to its consumers, is at the heart of this,” Stephen Elop, former Nokia CEO and now executive vice president of the Devices Group at Microsoft, said recently.

Nokia’s Lumia Series will act as a buffer and bolster Microsoft’s reputation as an A-1 company that is known for its quality throughout the world. Meanwhile, the Windows phone devices are another section that will profit from the costly merger. Microsoft is all set to take on the big guys on the scene. 

“The real value from this integration is bringing two globally sized capabilities in organizations together under one roof, really intimately and much more efficiently,” said Tom Gibbons, Microsoft corporate vice president who is responsible for the Nokia integration.

The years and years of experience and manufactured hardware of Nokia will accrue to Microsoft thereby invigorating it with fresh blood. No stone will be left unturned by the staff and administration in order to fully utilize the resources of Nokia within the context of Microsoft’s platform.  

“We have been planning for that, we have been learning about how each other does it, we have been going through and assessing who has the best tools for which part of the business and then how do we put those together so we take the best of both worlds, and now we get to start acting on it,” Gibbons said.

The mutual harmony of the two will probably feed off each other and lead to new vistas in invention and discovery. 

“We feel very excited that on Day One, the team will have an already established joint operating plan,” he said. “Customers should see a bunch of great end-to-end experiences that really empower them to have very enjoyable, very comprehensive solutions to things that they want to get done, whether you’re talking about smartphones or feature phones. The feature phone product family coming to Microsoft will start to have more of the Microsoft services shipped on those phones right out of the gate.”

In a way the future of technology will lie in the direction in which Microsoft has not ventured so far. The path ahead will have to be taken with a heart that revels in creativity and imagination. 

While knowledge and wisdom are limited, the play of forces unlocked in the human mind via a purely disinterested approach will yield much more wonderful results than a mechanical approach. 

“The vast majority of people do not have, nor will they ever have a personal computer,” Elop said. “They haven’t been exposed to Windows or Office, or anything like that, and in their lives it’s unlikely that they will. And yet through the mobile phone business we have an opportunity to introduce what we like to call the next billion people, the next billion people to connect to the Internet, to Microsoft, because they’ll have an opportunity perhaps to have a first Skype experience, or a first experience with Bing, as an example. And so there are literally billions of people who can be exposed to Microsoft for the very first time.”

Nokia is an asset and Microsoft ought to be thankful that it is getting a fillip via this new addition to its spectrum of specialties.  

As Nokia becomes part of Microsoft, “We have to not only evolve to fit into Microsoft in general, but into an evolving Microsoft,” he said.

Employees of Nokia’s Devices and Services business are “very excited to be joining Microsoft,” Elop said. “And we look forward to bringing our skills and experiences to Microsoft to do our very best to light up the Microsoft experiences for people all over the world.”