Microsoft to Buy Nook?

Here’s a marriage made in… somewhere, I suppose:

Barnes & Noble first announced last week that it plans to exit the highly competitive tablet hardware business, and that it will instead let third-party partners build future Nook devices. The Nook lineup failed to compete with Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and others.

Further adding to Barnes & Noble’s troubles, the company’s chief executive officer, William Lynch, resigned this week. And now industry insiders are speculating, according to The New York Times, that Microsoft could be a potential buyer of the Nook business.

Microsoft can’t break into the tablet business because they have too many mobile operating systems and zero ecosystem. It’s not because they aren’t partnered with a flailing bookseller with yet another operating system and also zero ecosystem.

I’d say this speculation is of the silly variety.