Microsoft and Nokia: a live-in relationship turned into marriage

Microsoft has agreed to acquire Nokia's device business for approximate US$ 7.17 Billion. It is happening amid a market situation where software company Microsoft is having hard time in selling its hardware product Tablet PC; Slate, and Nokia is having hard time regaining its share in mobile phone market. Software system can only show its capabilities by having right hardware and vice-versa. For a software company like Microsoft, all these years Intel and PC makers were its hardware partners. But in the mobile domain, Microsoft did not had any successful partners. After Google acquiring Motorola, Microsoft started venturing into hardware by launching its own Tablet PC. Although Slate failed in the market, it gave Microsoft an experience into building physical products running on its OS. Whether it’s a failure or not, Microsoft is desperate to get into hardware. On the other side, Nokia had software capabilities, SoC chip design capabilities, and hardware manufacturing capabilities, but over the time Nokia failed to make its software called Symbian to compete with Android and Apple's iOS, it has sold its semiconductor chip design business to Renesas. Instead of developing a new mobile software or enhancing Symbian, Nokia decided to use Microsoft's Windows OS (Windows 7 and 8) in its mobile phones. Fairly successful Windows phones from Nokia not able to gain significan...