Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella is aggressively reshaping Microsoft. They have sold off Bing Maps to Uber, and once they bought Nokia, they rapidly shut down the design side and have been producing good quality and thankfully very cheap handsets ever since.
But now, 7800 jobs from the phone side of the business are to go.
What is the strategy? It appears that they bought a great way in to the mobile phone handset business and are now trashing it.
Ok, the Nokia name had to go, but apart from the colourful polycarbonate casings and some ClearBlack screen technology, surely Microsoft could have hung on and produced a range of handsets by now?
The wait for a new Lumia flagship has grown tiresome. People are moving on, as they have grown accustomed to year on year flagship handset announcements.
Carriers in the UK list maybe two Lumia handsets, as a token gesture.
Windows Phone isn't taking off like it should be.
What is Microsoft's plan for the platform? Well, it's clear that they want everything to be connected to cloud services (that was the idea behind Chromebooks!), but for that customers need devices.
Windows laptops have increased unfathomably in price in recent years, and whilst the Microsoft Surface(s) are great devices, they are way too expensive.
The best value Windows tablets are made by Linx, but these are not big sellers, even though you can effectively pick one up as a Windows PC for around £100.
Maybe the cheap Lumia phones (which all run pretty much as fast as any flagship phone) have devalued the brand.
For me, Lumia phones are good. They work like you would expect a Nokia phone to work, but without the hit and miss problem that their old Symbian phones had.
Microsoft can sell them as cheaply as they like (Lumia handsets have been on offer for as little as £20!), and they connect well with all Windows 8 devices, but why aren't people discovering them and helping the Windows Phone market share to grow?
I think that the rolling thunder of Android has become a household name, along with the iPhone in the UK, and it would take guts to announce that "I use Windows Phone".
If the handset sales market was left to trundle on, maybe Microsoft stands a chance of cornering the market of people who, like myself, have grown sick of Android's constant updates and ever-increasing hardware requirements.
But Nadella seems hell bent on dissolving the phone side of the business. Does he think that the uptake of Windows Phone is too slow and they will head the same way that BlackBerry did?
In a rather naive move, one of Nokia's last handsets (the Nokia X and XL) ran on a stripped down (but unrecognisable) version of Android. They did look more like Windows Phone than anything else, and they weren't great (many people would have been very disappointed) - but look at how excited people were when they were announced.
Nadella promptly started to kill off the Nokia name and phone business shortly after the Nokia X handsets were released - And support for them was axed within weeks.
Given the recent talk about the BlackBerry "Venice", it looks like we will see a BlackBerry running Android at some point later this year. Microsoft would have done well to hold on to those Android aspirations, rather than saying that there are too many Android manufacturers and that the marketplace was full.
A half decent Nokia branded handset running Android would have sold bucketloads. Instead, the market is being flooded with substandard Far Eastern handsets, which are acceptable, but most of the time you wouldn't bother buying one, except on price.
Will Nokia ever get back into the handset manufacturing/design business? Maybe, but it'll be a couple of years away if they do.
Of course, they may never make another phone again. Nokia has been bought out, beaten up, disbanded, patented to death and banned from making phones, so maybe a recovery from all of this will never happen.
Microsoft have stripped out all of the best bits from Nokia, and are now casting them aside. It is a sad fact that the last chance of having a decent rival contender in the smartphone operating system battle is ebbing away.
I doubt that these moves by Microsoft will bolster the Windows Phone movement.
Maybe Microsoft will simply keep putting out the very occasional Lumia handset, and these will happily integrate with customer's home PCs and laptops.
It worries me that Microsoft may be just about to become another BlackBerry - But at least BlackBerry might finally accept that their OS is about as dead as it can get and they will embrace Android.
I've got mixed feelings about this: BlackBerry produce some great keyboards (I love a physical keyboard), but their OS sucks. I'd love to see a BlackBerry/Android phone, but once again, it would be yet another Android phone!
I hope that Microsoft don't exit the mobile phone business. Windows Phone is a good alternative to the other operating systems, and it would be a damn shame for Microsoft to kill it off before people realise that it works perfectly well and provides a much more viable alternative to the awful "landfill" Android phones that are available.
