A Windroid phone could run Android apps, enabling Microsoft to cherry pick the best apps from the enormous Android universe to boost their app store catalog. This could also save Microsoft the massive pain of begging for table scraps from top app developers and ending up with inferior versions of popular apps like Instagram for Windows Phone. Windroid could still support Windows Phone apps in parallel, enabling Microsoft to piggyback the Android app ecosystem while building out its own. A Windroid phone could have exclusive (or, at least the best) integration of Word, Excel, Powerpoint for productivity, Skype for communications, Xbox for entertainment, Nook for reading, Bing for search and navigation, IE for browsing, and so forth. Microsoft is the one company that can replace nearly all of Google’s services one-for- one with a compelling alternative. A Windroid phone could be offered at a lower cost than traditional Android to device makers and consumers if Microsoft waived the $5-10 per- unit patent royalty it currently collects. Waiving that royalty would be a boon for device makers, as the fee is equivalent to a substantial portion of the tiny margin that manufacturers generate on Android devices. Microsoft could go one step further and boost razor-thin device margins with an aggressive revenue-share on apps, games, books, Skype, Bing with the manufacturers, addressing a major pain point that device makers privately gripe about Google and Android today. If Windroid wanted to sweeten its offering even more, Microsoft could acquire a top music app (e.g. Spotify), top messaging app (e.g. WhatsApp), top productivity app (e.g. Evernote), or even spend a mere $10 billion a year on the top apps like Jason Calacanis suggests, to add these services to its arsenal. Then, Microsoft could call its “enemy of our enemy is our friend” pals like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare to join this collective effort to help destabilize Google’s market dominance, with deeper integration of their apps into Windroid.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 15:17:09 +0000
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