Microsoft to Stop Making Smartphones ⇥ reuters.com

A little over two years ago, Microsoft closed their $7.2B acquisition of Nokia’s smartphone business. Now, there’s basically nothing left. Jussi Rosendahl and Tuomas Forsell, Reuters:

The U.S. company said it would shed up to 1,850 jobs, most of them in Finland, and write down $950 million from the business. It did not say how many employees currently work on smartphones in the group as a whole.

A Finnish union representative told Reuters the cuts would essentially put an end to Microsoft’s development of new phones.

“My understanding is that Windows 10 will go on as an operating system, but there will be no more phones made by Microsoft,” said Kalle Kiili, a shop steward.

The predictability of this news doesn’t mask how shitty it is. What a loss.

As for Nokia, their feature phone business will live on. Last week, they announced that Hon Hai (you know them as Foxconn) would be manufacturing cellphones to be sold by HMD — a brand new company, run by former Microsoft VPs.

See Also: Ben Thompson:

Microsoft under Nadella’s leadership has, over the last three years, undergone a tremendous transformation, embracing its destiny as a device-agnostic service provider; still, it is fighting the headwinds of Amazon’s cloud, open source tooling, and the fact that mobile users had six years to get used to a world without Microsoft software. How much stronger might the company have been had it faced reality in 2007, but the culture made that impossible.