“An infusion of money from Microsoft sent Barnes & Noble’s stock zooming Monday, as the software giant established a way to get back into the e-books business,” The Associated Press reports.
“The two companies are teaming up to create a subsidiary for Barnes & Noble’s e-book and college textbook businesses, with Microsoft paying $300 million for a minority stake,” AP reports. “The deal gives Barnes & Noble ammunition to fend off shareholders who have agitated for a sale of the Nook e-book business or the whole company, but the companies said Monday that they are exploring separating the subsidiary, provisionally dubbed ‘Newco,’ entirely from Barnes & Noble. That could mean a stock offering, sale, or other deal.”
AP reports, “For Microsoft, the investment means that it will own 17.6 percent a company that sells tablet computers based on Google Inc.’s Android, one of the main competitors of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft’s smartphone software. Microsoft also said the deal means that there will be a Nook application for Windows 8 tablets, set to be released this fall. The app is likely to get a favored position on Windows 8 screens… William Lynch, the CEO of Barnes & Noble, said Nook software will continue to be available on devices like the iPhone that compete with Windows Phone.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Mook.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Terry O.” for the heads up.]
Start betting, how many months until those break up or Nook goes to bankruptcy…
Does any body remember if at least one company has make some money out of a deal with Microsoft?
Nokia, is going out, Toshiba, MTV..
What that means is that the next Nook tablet will be based upon Windows 8.
Sure fire way to insure that your product is the antithesis of “cool”: team up with Microsoft.
Apple
A Nook with Windows.
Kind of cozy, like the Tower of London….
Never seen or used a Nook but if it’s anything like the Kindle Touch it’s toast. My wife bought a KT last week and wow, what a crappy screen. The page transitions have nasty artifacts or whatever you call them. Definitely not an iPad but I guess it’ll work for just reading books.
Microsoft is just clutching at straws now. It’s certainly not like Amazon, Apple and Google are going to cooperate with MS so Ballmer decides B&N is the only way to go because there’s simply no other choice. It’s virtually an identical scenario to what MS is doing with Nokia: “Let’s try to revive the pummeled leftovers and see if we can use ’em.” Man, how the mighty have fallen…
I wonder how useful a Nook-sized textbook would be. Displaying an adequate amount of material along with graphics, video, animations, etc. is likely to be the new standard for interactive textbooks.
RePlay, Hmmm. sounds like an iPad to me. Wonder how those are selling and being used today… ???
🙂
Well, I’m no BTC fan, but smart move for micro sloth. B&N has CONTENT, and the closest thing to an ecosystem MS can buy in to so they can get a toe hold.
Imagine a ‘Mook’ running a stripped down 8 (like ‘roid 2.2 modified by Amz) and B&N titles? MS is doing why they do best: buying growth. Sure, Nokia is going down the tubes…makes buying them outright for pennies on the dollar, IF they decide to do it IF the Lumia-like offspring from a ‘Mokia’ has a chance.
I’m not saying any of it will work, but it’s a strategy many of us like, and like a lot.
Wow 300 mil to buy some sort of relative equality in a minor player, both sides must be sooo desperate.
aaah I forgot many years back MS bought into Dorling Kindersley, possibly the best graphic ‘interactive’ real book publisher around and the potential for making that truly interactive was enormous. Missed the boat, achieved nothing, MS dropped out and find themselves in the 4th division of interactive book publishers/technologies when they couldn’t see the potential or do the job when in the 1st with no serious competitors. Its almost sad once you stop laughing.
It is like the Poseidon Adventure teaming up with the Titanic. Both very sad with few survivors.
You all see the pattern again? Like that cell phone company (Nokia), very large sums of money are spent by Microsoft to get companies on board with their extremely late to the game mobile crap.
I don’t know how long Steve Ballmer can captain Microsoft. But like Ahab (the tyrannical captain of the Pequod who is driven by a monomaniacal desire to kill Moby Dick (Apple)), this isn’t going to end well for Microsoft! “There she blows!” Again!
I just don’t understand how the B&N stock can go up with M$ involved! Everyone M$ partners with fails miserably! Look what M$ did for smartphones! 🙂
$300 million for tile placement on a Nook. But this opens up B&N to MS products in stores so MS can close down their stupid stores.
Love the Yahoo headline: “Barnes & Noble, Microsoft Partnership: Desperate Meets Hopeless”
🙂
Another ‘Nokia/MS’ partnership? Perhaps!
The general public will think of this as huge.