Microsoft injecte 300 millions de dollars pour la liseuse Nook avec Barnes & Noble. Microsoft a cherché à vendre Bing à Facebook. On le sait, Facebook et Microsoft ont tissé des liens forts au cours des dernières années, la firme de Redmond ayant notamment pris une participation dans le capital de l’entreprise. La semaine dernière, Facebook a racheté à Microsoft une partie des brevets AOL qu’il venait lui-même d’acquérir.
Revenant sur cette transaction, le New-York Times révèle qu’il y a un environ un an, des dirigeants de Microsoft auraient approché Mark Zuckerberg pour lui proposer d’acheter le moteur de recherche Bing. L’idée étant, raconte l’article, que Facebook serait ainsi mieux placé pour tailler des croupières à Google. Cette initiative, qui n’avait pas été validée par Steve Ballmer, n’a pas abouti. Un revers pour Microsoft qui cherchait aussi sans doute à éviter que le réseau social ne développe son propre moteur de recherche qui pourrait rapidement devenir une menace pour Bing… (Eureka Presse) Facebook Buys $550 Million in Patents from Microsoft. AOL Sells 800 Patents For $1.1 Billion To Microsoft [Memo To Staff]
This just in: one chapter of AOL’s patent journey is coming to an end. The company is selling 800 patents to Microsoft for just north of $1 billion: $1.056 billion in cash to be exact. Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL (which owns TechCrunch), says that the company will continue to hold on to about 300 patents and patent applications after the sale. These span “core and strategic technologies” around advertising, search and content generation, he noted in a memo to employees. [Full memo below the break.] The sale to Microsoft came after a “competitive auction process” the company noted in a statement. It also includes the sale of the stock of an AOL subsidiary (unspecified which in the statement) “upon which AOL expects to record a capital loss for tax purposes and as a result, cash taxes in connection with the sale should be immaterial.” The sale is expected to be completed by the end of 2012.
The question of what Microsoft intends to do with these patents is the next big question. Microsoft Ends Another Vertical Market Dalliance—This Time In Healthcare. Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and was the founder of Microsoft’s Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave. While Microsoft has been the most successful platform company in history, it periodically has flirted with vertical market-specific businesses with only mixed success. In virtually all cases, it ends up exiting the vertical business. At times, this has been with great financial success, like Expedia, for example. The overriding decision in each case was to ensure the core platform business wasn’t threatened. Today, there’s a similar story.
At the same time as the platform shift is happening, there’s tremendous disruption within the healthcare ecosystem itself as I wrote about in the earlier series on disruption in healthcare (see links below). Socl. Microsoft Dangles Carrot In Front Of Developers With Windows Store Economics, But Will It Be Enough? Tonight Microsoft revealed that the public release of its Windows 8 Beta will be taking place sometime in late February of 2012. Along with Windows 8 Beta, Microsoft will also be launching its “Windows Store”, which was announced back in September. (You can check out the details on the Window Store’s new blog.) In previewing the new app store, Microsoft also revealed some details about what developers can expect in terms of both pricing and revenue share.
For starters, as the company has previously said, users will be able to license, purchase, and download Metro-style apps from the Windows Store — meaning that it will be the sole source of Metro apps. (Metro being the name Microsoft uses for the design language it developed for its new, touch friendly Windows Phone 7 interface.) While Microsoft is already operating app stores for Xbox and Windows Phones, this is their big push to create an in-Windows app store to take on iTunes.