Microsoft says they are all in on mobile

In 2014, shortly after Satya Nadella took over the mantle of Microsoft CEO, he declared the company’s strategy going forward would be “Mobile First, Cloud first”, seemingly only slightly different from Steve Ballmer’s “Devices and Services” slogan.

A year later Microsoft announced its retrenchment of their Lumia division, and while the Cloud First segment went from strength to strength the Mobile side is only expected to contribute negligible revenue to Microsoft’s bottom line.

When Bloomberg asked Microsoft Corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi, to explain this strategy Medhi explained that Microsoft was in fact “all in on mobile.”

He, however, expanded that this meant “all of our software will run on any device you own”, specifically noting that it would run on your iPhone and Android device, and also your Windows PC, but not making any mention of Windows Phones.

Interestingly if we listened closely to what Satya Nadella said way back in 2014 when he announced the “Mobile first, Cloud first” strategy, we would have understood that the present was exactly the future he envisioned 3 years ago, particularly since we now know he opposed the Nokia acquisition.

At the time he noted that mobility is about “experiences spanning a variety of devices, not about any one form factor that has a certain share position today.(emphasis ours)” Continuing, he said, “As we look to the future, what are the set of experiences across devices, some ours and some not ours, that we can power through experiences that we can create uniquely?”

With Microsoft’s CEO clearly not committed to Windows Phones, should our readers be? Let us know below.