Microsoft's enterprise phone strategy flops as revenue evaporates
Microsoft last week quietly acknowledged that a year-old plan to focus phone sales on the enterprise market is dead.
"We had no material Phone revenue this quarter," said Amy Hood, the company's CFO, during an earnings call with Wall Street on Thursday.
In fact, phone revenue amounted to just $5 million for the three-month stretch, representing a massive decline of 99% from the same period of the prior year. Assuming each Windows smartphone brought $500 to Microsoft, that was a sluggish pace of just five phones sold per hour. Worldwide.
It's not as if the demise of Microsoft's phone business was a surprise. The division, which was based on the 2014 acquisition of Nokia, has been in trouble with a capital "T" since 2015, when Microsoft wrote off $7.6 billion, nearly the full price it paid for the Finnish company's mobile phone assets and a collection of associated patents.
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