Ready for an update from the no-surprise department? Microsoft isn’t keen to sell either its Xbox or search businesses.
Today at the CODE Conference Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella indicated that he has no intention to divest Bing, the company’s search property, or Xbox, its gaming and living-room play. This should come as precisely no surprise.
It rises to the level of being news-worthy in that analysts pontificate often that the company should shed one or the other, logic aside. According to Re/Code’s own liveblog, Nadella indicated that Bing is “a lot more than Bing.com,” and that it serves around 30% of the search market, a figure that he likened to the iPhone’s market share.
Shade aside, Nadella’s point that his firm won’t sell Bing or otherwise release is simple to grok: Bing isn’t only a search portal, but is also the technology that Microsoft uses to power its broader search products that are found in Windows 8 and the like. So, to point towards a sale is to indicate that the company is willing to sell core technology to its platform work.
Or.
Pushing forward, Nadella said that he has no “intent” to sell Xbox. Why? Xbox was brought into the Windows world with the release of the Xbox One. That makes it part of Microsoft’s larger platform push, and therefore core its services and devices strategy. There are many stuck in a spreadsheet-addled world that can only view business units from the perspective of their discounted cash flows. That group, apparently, doesn’t include the current Microsoft CEO.
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