The phone is a pivotal to everything: Microsoft now owns Nokia’s device business

It’s official: Microsoft now fully owns Nokia’s device business, some-more than 25,000 new employees, a second mark on a list of a world’s many inclusive phone makers, and full control over a destiny of Windows Phone.

“The event for Microsoft to be both a inclination and services company, so that it can broach a finish tender to a consumers, is during a heart of this,” former Nokia CEO and soon-to-be Microsoft inclination conduct Stephen Elop pronounced in Microsoft’s proclamation of a deal.

“Nokia positively has a extensive abyss of knowledge in a design, a production and smoothness of devices,” Elop said. “Nokia over a years has literally delivered billions of devices. Just in a final year alone, some hundreds of millions.”

Indeed it has—though usually 30 million of those phones were of a Windows Phone-packing Lumia code in 2013, indicating that a new Microsoft-Nokia partnership still has a daunting highway brazen if Windows Phones are ever to truly turn mainstream. That’s only one of a reasons that we design Microsoft to tolerate a existence of a Nokia X, a budget-priced Android phone chock full of Microsoft services and a modified, Windows Phone-like interface.

Microsoft

It’s a phone for a masses, and it can assistance get Microsoft’s services in front of a masses. Make no mistake: As Microsoft evolves into a device and services business and continues with a “Windows Everywhere” push, simply removing OneDrive, Outlook.com, Skype, and other services into a hands of a vicious mass of users around a universe is a finish goal. For that, a phone is a pivotal to everything, a slot mechanism able of apropos a introduction to and daily front for a wider Windows ecosystem.

And while flourishing Windows Phone is clearly a large priority for a Microsoft-owned Nokia in a U.S, a concentration might be even stronger in building nations, where billions of people are shopping their initial phones—and where billions of people could caring reduction about a iconic Windows desktop. Nokia already commands immeasurable marketplace share in budget-conscious markets with Asha and a likes of a Lumia 520 and 521.

Here’s Elop again:

“The immeasurable infancy of people do not have, nor will they ever have a personal computer. They haven’t been unprotected to Windows or Office, or anything like that, and in their lives it’s doubtful that they will. And nonetheless by a mobile phone business we have an event to deliver what we like to call a subsequent billion people, a subsequent billion people to bond to a Internet, to Microsoft, since they’ll have an event maybe to have a initial Skype experience, or a initial knowledge with Bing, as an example. And so there are literally billions of people who can be unprotected to Microsoft for a really initial time.”

Devices and services. That’s what Nokia brings to a table—the residue of what new CEO Satya Nadella said when he took a reins during a Microsoft: “The universe going brazen is some-more of a software-powered world, delivered in devices.” Or, as Nadella put some-more bluntly in last night’s investor’s call: “In a universe of entire computing we wish Windows to be ubiquitous.”

The phone is a pivotal to all in a entire world. Welcome to One Microsoft, Nokia. No vigour or anything.