14 DAY TRIAL // At this point, there are five people left in the race for the Microsoft CEO seat, with Stephen Elop, the former Nokia CEO that joined the company a few months ago, said to be one of the leading candidates.
Since Elop is credited with so many chances to take over from Steve Ballmer, he already has a plan for the Redmond-based empire in case he is given the reins of the company.
According to a report by Bloomberg, Elop is planning to get rid of two important divisions, namely Bing and Xbox, in an attempt to help Microsoft focus more on its core products like Windows.
While neither Elop nor Microsoft commented on this report since no decision has been made on the next company CEO, selling Xbox and Bing might not be such a shocking decision after all.
In fact, Microsoft has invested millions of dollars in making Bing successful, and it even does the same thing today, as it struggles to turn its search engine into a full-featured platform deeply integrated into all of its products.
The problem is that Bing is still far from becoming a successful product, as Google is clearly dominating the search engine market.
Stephen Elop wants Microsoft to pay much more attention to its key products, including Windows, cloud-based services, and hardware, as more Surface tablets are on their way, according to various sources.
Steve Ballmer himself has said pretty much the same thing, but nobody every discussed the possibility of selling Xbox or Bing, as they both received or are set to receive more updates.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether Elop is indeed the next Microsoft CEO, as many people familiar with the matter hinted that Ford’s CEO Alan Mulally had many more chances of taking over from Ballmer.