What could Microsoft gain from buying Nook? - whitakertecame
More a yr ago, Microsoft endowed $300 billion in Barnes & Noble's design to spin-off its Corner business. At the time, the deal promised a fewer tablet-central possibilities. Would Corner tablets dump Mechanical man in favor of Windows? Would the Corner catalog be part of an entertainment-central device like the calm-mythological Xbox Surface?
Twelve months later, all Microsoft has to picture for its Nook investment is a Windows 8 modern UI app—an app that probably would have landed in the Windows Salt away in any case. But new reports evoke that hasn't turned Steve Ballmer and co.'s taste for the Barnes & Noble spin-polish off. As a matter of fact, Microsoft may have even bigger plans for Nook.
TechCrunch recently got its hands on domestic documents that depict Microsoft is pondering an outright acquisition of Nook Media LLC for a cool $1 billion.
But what use would Microsoft induce for a struggling e-Word of God business? For $1 billion, this has to be more equitable a plan of action acquisition to hold back Nook out of the manpower of competitors like Google or Amazon.
Devices and services and Nook, oh my
Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer famously same last October the keep company was transitioning into a "devices and services" company.
Information technology seems the currently available Nook computer hardware doesn't have some to do with the alleged treat. The documents seen by Techcrunch say that Nook e-readers and tablets would constitute phased-away towards the end of the company's fiscal yr 2022. Nook would then modulation into a purely digital business, distributing its apps and catalog of reading reincarnate happening third-political party devices. It makes sense; while Nook hardware sales tanked hard over the holidays, digital mental object sales really rose 13 percent.
Rumors about the end of the Nook surfaced in February.
Selling books is definitely a service, on the other hand. Microsoft is no alien to peddling content, with Xbox Music and Xbox Video recording already easy on Windows 8 and the Xbox 360. Millions of people are already invested with in the Corner ecosystem.
"It appears that Microsoft [with its rumored Nook purchase] is looking for a content cooperator brand that they can use to help develop self-satisfied opportunities beyond the movies and music they provide today through Xbox Live," says Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at market research firm NPD.
Adding "digital print" to medicine, video, and play would complete the society's entertainment offerings. Corner could also go a default app built into Microsoft's software, and would likely continue to be sold on otherwise platforms as symptomless, such as Android and iOS. Office excursus, Microsoft has shown a willingness to expand its reach to competitory operating systems.
Schooling the education market
But Nook is more just novels, biographies, magazines, and comic books.
Nook is also a big participant in the emerging digital textbook market with products like Nook Study, a textbook reading material app for Windows and Mac PCs. For Microsoft, Nook could be 1 part of a much bigger play into the education market. Students, especially university students, are a prime target for new Windows PCs and Office 365 subscriptions.
A Microsoft-owned textbook app opens up an opportunity to create newly devices for the education market, such as a tablet optimized for indication textbooks and impermanent with Situatio.
"A 9-column inch tablet running the Windows mobile Atomic number 76 makes signified," Gartner analyst Allen Weiner wrote in April 2012, shortly after Barnes & Imperial and Microsoft announced their initial Nook investing. Weiner argued the popularity of Berth with students for note taking (OneNote) and papers existence (Word, Surpass, PowerPoint) made a 9-inch tablet a great idea for students.
Weiner was unavailable for annotate before press time, but his year-old disceptation still sounds suchlike a compelling reason for Microsoft to snaffle Corner. Instead of using a "Windows mobile OS," as Weiner argued pre-Windows 8, it's more realistic to think about a tablet running Microsoft's primary OS. The 9-inch shape factor makes much feel for the education market than the trendier 7-edge mini-tablets Microsoft and its partners are reportedly working on.
If you retributory want to read a novel or the latest issue of The Economist, then a 7-inch slate suits your purposes well. But when you're talking about textbooks with complicated charts, models, timelines, and some other art, a big area is needed if you want to make sense of them.
A 9-inch, Nook-centrical Surface slate could test pretty persuasive for school-bound students if the price is right, especially if it's powered by Intel's upcoming Bay Trail Atom processors.Bare for the textbook recitation and Type Cover-well-found for the schoolroom, a Corner Surface could even chip a viable niche for the other gloomy Windows RT operating system.
Only that's all speculation. For now, while we can pronounce that a deeper Microsoft-Nook marriage is indeed chock-full of intriguing possibilities, the alliance has accomplished very little to get excited about thus Former Armed Forces.
Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/451760/what-could-microsoft-gain-from-buying-nook.html
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