Microsoft Corporate VP confirms their next phone will be "high end and category innovating"

At the BUILD Tour London event  Microsoft Corporate VP of Windows Kevin Gallo confirmed Microsoft’s direction for their own-branded handsets will remain the enterprise.

At a Windows developer user group event Gallo said the company will focus primarily on the Enterprise segment, he told attendees. He explained Nokia’s strategy of pushing out low-end consumer devices was never going to make any money, and the business segment is Microsoft’s core strength.

“We’re really aligned to what we’ve done on the Windows desktop,” he said, “which is we’ll lead with some high end and category innovation like we’ve done with Surface, and OEMs will go and build the breadth of the catalog.”

This suggests that the next generaton of Microsoft’s Windows phones, be they the Surface Phone or not, will likely be high end devices like the HP Elite X3, which are expensive and not distributed via normal commericial channels.

Gallo also insisted Microsoft has not abandoned Windows Phone and that they will soon push out a significant update to the Windows 10 Mobile OS aligned with the Anniversary update of the PC version.

“Windows Phone is fully supported. We’re fully behind it. We’re not abandoning the phone,” he said. “There’s really no change in what our direction or strategy is with respect to releasing the Windows Phone software.”

With Microsoft depending on the large Windows 10 market and Universal Windows Apps to carry the small Windows 10 Mobile market it remains to be seen if this experiment of a Consumer-less Enterprise phone will be viable in the market.