Microsoft’s Acquisition Began Back in February at MWC, With over 50 Meetings Later

More details are beginning to appear about how the Nokia buy out went down, according to Allthingsd the talks started last february at MWC when the chairman of the board met up with Elop.

the recent deal can be traced to a meeting in February at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona between then Chairman Siilasmaa and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Purchasing Nokia wasn’t the original plan, instead they thought about how to further their partnership and help promote sales:

Many, many scenarios were considered, Ballmer said.

“We had a Plan A, a Plan B a Plan C,” Ballmer said. “And by the time we were done we had A, A1, A-Prime, B, C, D, E. We looked at many many possibilities together and ultimately took this one with us buying all of Nokia’s phone business, becoming an innovation partner and customer of Here and licensing patents from Nokia.”

The interesting questions is why indeed did they decide to buy out all the device line, rather than jut the smartphone business, leaving Nokia with the Asha line.

Ballmer acknowledged that Microsoft was less familiar with that business.

“The part of the Nokia business that comes to us in this acquisition with which we’ve had to do the most learning over the last several months is the mobile phone business,” he said.

Read more about how the deal went down here:

http://allthingsd.com/20130902/barcelona-rendezvous-50-nokia-board-meetings-led-to-microsoft-deal/?mod=tweet

Category: Lumia, Nokia, Windows Phone