Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…That brings us to Nokia, but I think let’s save Nokia for the end here. Yeah, Nokia is our coda. What it does bring us to is a realization from the very top of Microsoft that the profit pools in mobile are changing. This is a thing that I think Steve Ballmer also doesn’t get credit for. Bill Gates was obsessed correctly with being the software company. It was a brilliant business strategy to be the software platform. Then everything around you had to interoperate with you. Again, the profit pools in the PC world just accrued to software vendors. It was remarkable how the PC manufacturers over time had no profits and Microsoft had tremendous profits. Steve Ballmer realized pretty early, I think because of the Google Android thing, mobile was going to shake out differently. Future hardware platforms were not guaranteed to have the same profits in the value chain the way that the PC did. He was pretty aggressive about actually we need to be in the hardware business. I know that seems really unattractive to us as a company because we’ve been in the software business. There’s this great general rule that it’s really hard for any business to enter a lower margin business than the one they are currently in. Amazon can go from ecommerce to AWS.…

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