Shortly after Stephen Elop joined Nokia as CEO, speculation arose that Elop’s former employer, Microsoft, might make a move to buy the Finnish mobile phone giant. And while the two companies have already entered into an alliance, Elop today tossed a little cold water on the theory that Microsoft may want to buy the company outright.
“I’m not aware of a strategic interest that Microsoft would have in the rest of the business,” Elop told Reuters. “To the extent that a partnership has been formed around what they’re really interested in, then what would an acquisition bring other than a good year of anti-trust investigation, huge turmoil, delays?”
Given those remarks, it appears that Microsoft is following a similar path to the alliance it formed with Yahoo after it failed to buy that company for as much as $45 billion. In fact, Microsoft hasn’t really made a big acquisition since its $6 billion buyout of Seattle online advertising company aQuantive.
Maybe the era of big acquisitions at Microsoft is over.
But the software company is still willing to dole out serious cash to get in bed with key partners. It reportedly plans to pay Nokia $1 billion as part of a strategic alliance to jointly develop and market smartphones that use the Windows Phone operating systems.
In today’s report in Reuters, Elop said the companies have started work on the new phones.
John Cook is co-founder of GeekWire, a tech news site in Seattle. Follow on Twitter: @geekwirenews.
