Microsoft May Acquire Nook Tablet Business From Barnes and Noble 157
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.)
The Age Old Story (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't grow a market, just buy one.
Our story so far... (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, it's an improvement. They stopped innovating and went to almost 10 years of mee-too-itis, not learning from IBM and OS 2, and it caught up to them. So buy an innovation that isn't mee too.
Buying other peoples' successful stuff has its own issues.
you're assuming... (Score:2, Insightful)
That the Nook had a market to burn. The hardware-for-price was a winner for the form factor but ultimately B&Ns walled garden app store proved once again that what people really want is selection.
I own 3 nooks, but they're all running CM 10.1. Stock ROM is very limited.
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
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Re:Next Up (Score:5, Insightful)
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<.
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Re:Next Up (Score:4, Insightful)
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.