A la Caneca! (Hablemos de Microsoft y su Inversión en Nokia)

A la caneca. Desechada. Pasada directamente al P&G. Así quedó la inversión de USD 7,200 Millones realizada por Microsoft en Nokia el año pasado.

Hace unas semanas, Satya Nadella, el CEO de la compañía, anunció la Nueva Misión de Microsoft y dio algunos lineamientos de para iría la compañía. Hoy, en su primer anuncio del nuevo año fiscal (Microsoft cierra año el 30 de Junio), Nadella anunció que la compañía asumirá un gasto de USD 7,600 Millones (más que lo que pagó por Nokia Devices and Services) y procederá al despido de cerca de 7,800 empleados, la mayoría de ellos provenientes precisamente de esa adquisición.

El proceso, que hace parte de una reestructuración total del negocio de smartphones de la compañía, busca claramente disminuir costos en una división en la que no se ven resultados (Windows tiene una participación de menos del 3% en el mercado de smartphones) y eliminar la variedad modelos existentes a favor de una estrategia más Apple y menos Samsung (todo pareciera indicar que habrá máximo 2 modelos de smartphones Lumia).

“Estamos pasando de una estrategia enfocada en hacer crecer un negocio de telefonía independiente a una estrategia para crear y crecer un vibrante ecosistema de Windows, incluyendo nuestra familia de dispositivos propios. En el corto plazo, queremos tener un portafolio de teléfonos más efectivo y enfocado, manteniendo la capacidad de reinvención de largo plazo en el segmento de movilidad”. Satya Nadella, CEO – Microsoft

Se muere Lumia? No. Aunque no hay un detalle claro sobre qué quiere decir “un portafolio más enfocado”, todo parece indicar que la compañía no quiere seguir manteniendo la amplia gama de productos actuales sino que quiere concentrarse en una o dos opciones. Punto.

Le dice adiós Microsoft a su estrategia de Mobile-First? Cero! Al contrario. Mobile es el corazón de lo que está haciendo la compañía. La diferencia es que no habrá 15 modelos diferentes de teléfonos Lumia, la compañía trabajará más con sus OEMs para que haya más oferta y sus soluciones y aplicaciones – que son en realidad del core de su negocio – seguirán llegando a todos los dispositivos, sin importar el sistema operativo que utilicen. No en vano hemos venido viendo los anuncios y lanzamientos de productos como Office para Android o Cortana para iOS y Android.

Si les interesa pueden leer (en inglés) el memo completo enviado por Nadella a todos sus empleados:

Team,

Over the past few weeks, I’ve shared with you our mission, strategy, structure and culture. Today, I want to discuss our plans to focus our talent and investments in areas where we have differentiation and potential for growth, as well as how we’ll partner to drive better scale and results. In all we do, we will take a long-term view and build deep technical capability that allows us to innovate in the future.

With that context, I want to update you on decisions impacting our phone business and share more on last week’s mapping and display advertising announcements.

We anticipate that these changes, in addition to other headcount alignment changes, will result in the reduction of up to 7,800 positions globally, primarily in our phone business. We expect that the reductions will take place over the next several months.

I don’t take changes in plans like these lightly, given that they affect the lives of people who have made an impact at Microsoft. We are deeply committed to helping our team members through these transitions.

Phones. Today, we announced a fundamental restructuring of our phone business. As a result, the company will take an impairment charge of approximately $7.6 billion related to assets associated with the acquisition of the Nokia Devices and Services business in addition to a restructuring charge of approximately $750 million to $850 million.

I am committed to our first-party devices including phones. However, we need to focus our phone efforts in the near term while driving reinvention. We are moving from a strategy to grow a standalone phone business to a strategy to grow and create a vibrant Windows ecosystem that includes our first-party device family.

In the near term, we will run a more effective phone portfolio, with better products and speed to market given the recently formed Windows and Devices Group. We plan to narrow our focus to three customer segments where we can make unique contributions and where we can differentiate through the combination of our hardware and software. We’ll bring business customers the best management, security and productivity experiences they need; value phone buyers the communications services they want; and Windows fans the flagship devices they’ll love.

In the longer term, Microsoft devices will spark innovation, create new categories and generate opportunity for the Windows ecosystem more broadly. Our reinvention will be centered on creating mobility of experiences across the entire device family including phones.

Mapping. Last week, we announced changes to our mapping business and transferred some of our imagery acquisition operations to Uber. We will continue to source base mapping data and imagery from partners. This allows us to focus our efforts on delivering great map products such as Bing Maps, Maps app for Windows and our Bing Maps for Enterprise APIs.

Advertising. We also announced our decision to sharpen our focus in advertising platform technology and concentrate on search, while we partner with AOL and AppNexus for display. Bing will now power search and search advertising across the AOL portfolio of sites, in addition to the partnerships we already have with Yahoo!, Amazon and Apple. Concentrating on search will help us further accelerate the progress we’ve been making over the past six years. Last year Bing grew to 20 percent query share in the U.S. while growing our search advertising revenue 28 percent over the past 12 months. We view search technology as core to our efforts spanning Bing.com, Cortana, Office 365, Windows 10 and Azure services.

I deeply appreciate all of the ideas and hard work of everyone involved in these businesses, and I want to reiterate my commitment to helping each individual impacted.

I know many of you have questions about these changes. I will host an employee Q&A tomorrow to share more, and I hope you can join me.

Satya