The prevailing wisdom is that Windows Phone is an unmitigated disaster that has failed globally. Microsoft appears to have responded accordingly,
gutting what was left of its phone division with 7,800 layoffs and writing down $7.6 billion of assets acquired in the purchase of Nokia's Devices and Services business.
This comes shortly after
last week's announcements that an image acquisition group that was formerly part of the Bing Maps team was being sold to Uber, and that the display ads business was being sold to AOL.
In the mission statement Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella disseminated
late last month, he said that there would be "tough choices" ahead. It's not clear just how tough it was to choose to get rid of a division that he reportedly didn't want anyway, but I assume this is what he had in mind.
Today's announcement was paired with
another missive from the CEO that continues the trend of buzzword-heavy content-light statements. This affirmed the mapping and advertising changes, and purportedly laid out the new vision for phones.
