And now Microsoft has a hardware division. I can easily see most hardware vendors being ousted by the trio of Google/MS/Apple - all of whom now either make or have been making their own hardware to go along with their software. And so the walled garden grows...
With the exception of the folks doing keyboards (which they have been serially been screwing up for the last ten years) Microsoft has some very good hardware people. The Surface was a nice piece of kit, but way expensive (for unavoidable reasons, I hear) and running the wrong software (also for unavoidable reasons).
I remember their developer evangelists were running around showing off some $3000 Samsung tablet PC prior to the Surface and Surface Pro being released.
People think the Surface is expensive because they compare it to the iPad or Nexus 7/10 product lines, but it seems like Windows RT is closer to a port of Windows 8 to ARM than anything else, which makes it seem odd that you'd think to run Windows Rt on a $200 tablet.
But now they're in control of a hardware vendor - one in a position to allow them to close off WP8 to other OEMs, and potentially a future version of Windows.
We've yet to see Google do anything interesting w/ Motorola though (unless I've missed something). The Nexus line are all currently built by LG, no? So sure they own Motorola, but they haven't (tightly) integrated it into their Android plans.
The Moto X has two interesting clusters of features:
1) The obvious one and only mildly interesting is the customization. I believe that will appeal to a large market segment.
2) The less obvious and more creepy one is the battery saving combined with the always on features. I believe this is very much the Google vision at play. The Moto X is always on, aware of its surroundings, and integrated with Google Now. I see this is part of the same vision that created Google Glass, and ultimately will be a Google chip in your brain.
How well it works in practice I have no idea. Google Now haven't impressed me, it best it tells me what I wanted to know 15 minutes ago. The Moto X features be utterly useless. But the direction is definitely interesting.
The phone is clearly not interesting to those mainly interested in peak CPU performance, DPI, or screen size. I'll also skip it for now. Let someone else be guinea pigs.
Exactly. This acquisition gels well with the "devices and services" narrative. It helps that Microsoft has good hardware division, and combined with Nokia I hope they find traction in Mobile market. This is a good acquisition for MS, as Nokia was already on WP. I wonder what happens to the rumored Nokia tablet now.
