Best Buy is dying, Apple and Amazon are building empires by being retailers, the carriers who are also retailers aren’t helping, the rules have changed.  MS isn’t good at retail right now, and they need to get good in a hurry.  I personally think they should have bought the B&M B&N stores.  They need a retail presence and they need wholly owned hardware to stock the stores so they can get Apple’s margins and economies of scale.  Why doesn’t anyone else see this?  It’s so obvious, and as long as Apple goes unrivaled, their profits and stock will continue its meteoric rise.  

The digital world is transforming in front of our eyes, whole industries are collapsing, unemployment is permanent for a lot of people and MS is stuck fighting the last wars with old weapons.  Funny thing is, Google gets it, but is playing from behind because they never plan anything, like being consumer-facing retailer or an OEM or a patent troll.  Life is different outside the data center, eh, guys?

This investment is the result of the patent infringement case that Microsoft was about to lose, and would have been subject to B&N’s counter suit involving anticompetitive behaviour.

B&N settled the suit and Microsoft is now spinning the dollar amount as an ‘investment’.

B&N should not have settled.

I think the reason why Microsoft is doing a lot of “catching up”, is not because they are lazy and not knowing what to do.  It is Monopoly.  If Microsoft truly brought some of these things to the market, they could have completely dominated the market and nobody would have even a remote chance of selling anything.  With Microsoft having that dominating power back 10 years ago or so (maybe close to 15 now?) they need to move “lazily” to allow others to have a chance.  Since if Microsoft went full force into the market when the market was fresh, they could have completely wiped everyone out.