When it comes to helping developers create apps for the WIndows Phone platform, Microsoft has been pretty aggressive, such as offering to fund developers to a certain degree and so on. It is financial incentives like this that when it was rumored that Microsoft could be looking to pay their OEMs to manufacture Windows Phone handsets, it did not exactly come as a huge shock or surprise. From what we heard, Microsoft was rumored to pay a bunch of OEM – Samsung, Sony, Huawei, and others – $2.6 billion in total to make Windows Phone devices for them.
Typically it would be the other way around, as OEMs would have to pay Microsoft to license the Windows Phone platform from them. This rumor came about from Eldar Murtazin who is pretty well-known when it comes to revealing spot-on leaks and rumors. However in this case it seems that Eldar might have gotten it wrong, at least according to Sony, who refuted those claims. According to a tweet by Microsoft’s Frank X. Shaw, he wrote, “reality check. Do we do co-marketing with partners? You bet! But these numbers are complete fiction!” Perhaps the $2.6 billion figure could be wrong, but Shaw does not exactly deny the practice either. Could that number be more, or could it be less? What do you guys think of Microsoft’s strategy anyway?
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