When Microsoft chief experience officer Julie Larson Green was asked if Microsoft was working on an Android fork, she said ”We’ll go wherever our customers are.” At that time the natural reaction from the mobile development community was to assume that Redmond was working towards a future where Android and Windows were close cousins.
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Now fast forward to this month, and rumours are flying around of a new Surface Phone, having been all but confirmed by Microsoft CMO Chris Capossela. In an interview with Windows Weekly, when he was pressed whether Redmond would finally come up with something new to convince smartphone users not to abandon the Windows Mobile ecosystem he said, “We need some sort of spiritual equivalent on the phone side that doesn’t just feel like it’s a phone for people who love Windows. It’s got to be a phone where it’s like, ‘Wow, that’s a real shock or that’s a real breakthrough, and that’s going to make me (as a hypothetical Apple AAPL +0.93% fan) pause before I buy my 17th iPhone.’ And we need time to actually go build that.”
