Microsoft is putting together a brutal ecosystem in Android and iOS

The share of Windows Phone takes a few months to plummet, and although there are honorable exceptions still waiting for Windows 10 Mobile are available to all terminals of the manufacturer and this would constitute a new impulse for the third mobile platform at stake.

That’s the plan A for Microsoft, but the Redmond Company takes time to pose a plan B. This is to conquer the market not by the front door, with its own platform, but by the back door with their applications and services. Demonstrating that these solutions can not only work well on Windows Mobile Phone or Windows 10 terminals, but they do even better on Android and iOS.

Services and applications, the first

Microsoft took some time to realize the potential business that was losing by not leverage their applications and services rather than on its platform, but that error was soon corrected, and while the company promotes a handful of solutions both Android and iOS platform.

The best example of that jump to rival platforms was Office, the office suite that had been the preserve of Windows and Windows Phone and in March 2014 became available on the iPad. Later he gives the jump to Android and will become the bat on the reference in this segment.

It has not been the only Microsoft products to try to win Android users and iOS, and here also deserve special mention the cloud services of Microsoft with OneDrive to the head. There are many others who find it difficult (Bing) and others have long been an indispensable part of the experience of many users (Skype), but the thrust of Microsoft does not seem to brake as evidenced by the fact that they had the “audacity” of Cortana offer on iOS and Android.

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If you cannot compete, buy

Another increasingly important alternative plan that attack element and that is they are representing acquisitions Microsoft is making in recent times in the field of mobile applications.

In the list of acquisitions of companies Microsoft offered the Wikipedia we can see how there are many field-oriented mobility. Accompli (December 2014 ), Sunrise (February 2015), Wunderlist (June 2015) and Talko ( December 2015 ) have been some of the most recent, but all of them joined him today the acquisition of SwiftKey, the famous developer of mobile keyboard.

Such purchases have made ​​Microsoft a true leader in the field of mobile productivity in which it seems clear that they want to focus. Some of them have been integrated into other products (Talko in Skype) while others have served to liven services not had too prominent client. Outlook is the case, which has become one of the best mobile email clients no longer for Windows Phone, but Android and iOS in which by the way has also been integrated calendar Sunrise.

The purchase of SwiftKey is curious especially considering they’d just throw your Word Flow in iOS, so we’ll see what the future of these two products now that Microsoft has indicated it will not abandon the development of Swiftkey. SwiftKey may be integrated into Word Flow or vice versa, but again we are faced with an example of how Microsoft does not want to miss the opportunity to get into devices rival platforms through that area of productivity.

A fork of Android in the future?

The last of the aspects that seem to surround all this alternative strategy in the field of mobile is affecting the future of the dominant platforms. Microsoft can do little or nothing to make Apple users bet for their services, but Android is another matter, and the reason has a name: Cyanogen.

This company has long offered its own version of Android, and it is known the fact that Google services and applications need not be native or default. Instead the company can offer services like and compromises such as that offered in their tablets Amazon (and its Fire Phone failed) since it began to go down that road.

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There was even talk that the Redmond company would be interested in investing in Cyanogen but those rumors were denied. Although there has not been a final product, if we have seen how Cortana made ​​its appearance in CyanogenMod few days ago, but there are precedents.

For example, we were offered the Nokia X, this experiment aborted by Microsoft after the acquisition of the Finnish manufacturer. On that occasion we saw how they worked those smartphones input range Android combined with the services of Microsoft, and the idea would be essentially the same whether Microsoft really just is being interested in this aspect of the plan.

What is clear is that the Redmond Company does not want to lose the battle of mobility. And if you cannot win with its terminals and its own mobile platform, you can do it somewhat more secretive because of that brutal ecosystem of applications and services that have long been the preserve of non-Windows attentive, Google and Apple.