Stephen Elop, one of the candidates primed to take over from Steve Ballmer as Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer, may have a few radical plans in mind for the company, according to a report by Bloomberg. The ex-Nokia head honcho, according to the source, may be looking at expanding the reach of Office software programmes like Word, Excel and PowerPoint to a variety of smartphones and tablets, including those made by Apple and Google. Elop, who is set to join Microsoft, earlier agreed to sell Nokia’s handset business to the software maker for $7.2 billion in September. Resigning from Nokia post the official announcement, the executive is now pegged to head a new Microsoft device unit that will be in charge for hardware like the Surface tablet and the Xbox console range. Elop, according to the source, is now assuming that the company can create more value by maximising the sale of Office rather than making it a prop to base the sales of Windows-based devices on. The company’s Windows division reported a rise of 4.6 percent in revenue in the latest fiscal year, accounting for $19.2 billion for Microsoft. The unit that includes Office and other corporate software products saw a rise of 2.5 percent in sales, accounting for $24.7 billion out of the total company revenue.
Stephen Elop may be looking to change Microsoft's business strategy
But that is just the beginning for Elop. The executive may also be prepared to shut down or sell major businesses to sharpen the company’s focus, including Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine. While the latter has been a costly effort by the company to take on Google, the source also claims that the executive could be looking at selling businesses like the Xbox gaming console, if he determines that they are not essential to the company’s core strategy of focusing on Office.During his earlier stint at Microsoft, Elop was said to have brokered a deal to offer Office on Nokia’s Symbian phone software. Three years ago, Microsoft started rolling out free, scaled-down versions of programmes like Word and PowerPoint that anyone could access via the Internet. Office Web Apps recently saw the addition of real-time collaborative editing, making it an even stronger competitor for Google Docs.
Elop was also critical in the development of Office 365, a hosted version of the suite for customers who prefer to pay an annual subscription for web access rather than buying the software outright. While a spokesman for Nokia declined to comment to the source, a spokesman from Microsoft said, “We appreciate Bloomberg’s foray into fiction and look forward to future episodes.”
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