Microsoft to Sell Comcast Stake

Microsoft has decided to sell its 7.3 percent stake in Comcast. Microsoft had owned 150,935,575 Class A common stock in the cable operator.

Microsoft made its $1 billion investment in Comcast in 1997, when Microsoft had interest in becoming a major player in the cable set-top box business. Some observers familiar, even casually, with cable operator strategy would have argued even then that the effort was unlikely to bear much fruit.

As anxious as some operators might have been to gain a stamp of legitimacy in the coming wave of Internet-based or interactive content, cable executives when speaking to other cable executives would have insisted they had no intention of "letting Microsoft take our business." In those pre-Google days, it was Microsoft cable operators worried most about, in terms of digital-savvy outsiders with the skills and credibility to siphon off the leading edge of interactive attention, if not business.

Apparently Microsoft long ago realized its hoped-for strategy would not lead to success. After several years when Microsoft powered an on-screen program guide for Comcast in some of its Washington markets, Comcast stopped using the guide altogether, in favor of its alternate guide, developed with Gemstar.

In May 2007, Comcast stopped using Microsoft’s on-screen program guide for its digital cable boxes in Washington state, the only U.S. location that software feature was being used.

Microsoft has had much-better luck as a technology partner for leading U.S. wireless companies, though.