The Long Road to a Nokia Deal (continued) ...
This is a fascinating story with an ending I sure did not anticipate. For posterity I've posted 'the rest of the story' (as Paul Harvey might have stated) below:
>> A Bloody Ballmer and Stalled Discussions on the Long Road to a Nokia Deal (continued) ...
Nick Wingfield
The New York Times | Bits
September 4, 2013
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
< ... Big Snip ... 1st part posted by Zax here:http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=29094867 >
Microsoft and Nokia decided to reconvene over Memorial Day weekend in May at the London offices of Simpson Thacher, one of Microsoft’s law firms, when a small disaster struck.
Mr. Ballmer and Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, were walking across the law firm’s lobby, when Mr. Ballmer — absorbed in reading a document from Nokia related to the deal — tripped on a glass coffee table. Letting out a loud shriek, Mr. Ballmer fell to floor, hit his head and began bleeding above his eyebrow.
Executives from Nokia sequestered in a conference room elsewhere in the offices were baffled by the sound, wondering whether Mr. Ballmer was reacting badly to a counter-proposal they had made. His security detail patched him up, and Mr. Ballmer resumed negotiations.
By the afternoon of the next day, participants in the discussions noticed the coffee table was gone.
Those discussions didn’t go far either. Nor did a follow-up trip that Mr. Ballmer and Mr. Smith made to Finland on June 14. The two ate an early dinner with Mr. Siilasmaa and Mr. Elop at a mansion, once owned by the Russian military, that now belongs to Nokia in the rural town of Batvik, not far from Helsinki.
The men discussed the lack of progress in their deal talks and unrelated topics, like the disclosure of the National Security Agency’s Prism Internet surveillance program by the former N.S.A .contractor Edward Snowden. The Microsoft executives spent all of four hours on the ground in Finland.
After that aborted meeting, Nokia declined to have more formal deal talks with Microsoft unless it agreed to a handful of preconditions, including a commitment to set up a source of financing for Nokia. Nokia also made it clear that it had no intention of parting ways with a mapping service called Here, which Microsoft wanted as part of the deal. Microsoft had to come to peace with that, Nokia executives said.
Once Microsoft and Nokia were on the same page about those terms, executives from both companies met in early July in New York, where they finally had a breakthrough. Microsoft proposed that Nokia could grant a license to its mapping service that would allow Microsoft access to its source code, so it could customize the service and own any improvements it made. Nokia liked the idea, which still gave it the freedom to freely license the mapping service to other companies.
Over the course of a weekend, Microsoft and Nokia gradually edited a set of PowerPoint slides outlining the deal into a set of principles that both companies were happy with. The companies set Sept. 3 as a deadline for turning those slides into a formal deal agreement and conducting due diligence.
Mr. Ballmer and Mr. Siilasmaa shook hands on an agreement that weekend.
At 6 A.M., Helsinki time, on Sept. 3, Nokia and Microsoft finally announced their deal. ###
- Eric - |
