Microsoft restructuring or moving away from Windows Phone?

[The Hand]

Looks like MS are shifting away from the phone market to a degree:

http://www.windowscentral.com/micros...-was-necessary

http://video.ft.com/4346005146001/Mi...ones/Companies

MS said they will be making Windows Phones for another 2 years also, but it does make me wonder what the future of Windows phone will be?

[MrDLips]

They are on the brink of Win 10 which is supposed to tie up all of their hardware aspirations, and they ditch the phone side half a month before release?

Given that it's going to be possible to run ios and android apps on win 10, I would've thought they'd have given it a year from its release before taking such drastic action. Surely this cross-platform support would have drawn in a much bigger userbase who are tired of their platform but bound by their app investment.

[KeyboardDemon]

I haven't had time to read the article, hopefully I'll find the time soon. As a Windows phone user this does concern me, but I won't comment until I've had a chance to read up

[peterb]

Seems there is a lot of speculation, but the gist is that the business has been written off as a lump sum in the accounts, and the Lumia range will be streamlined.

A (cynical) bit of me wonders if MS bought Nokia as much to stop it falling into other hands as for the technology itself. I don't think its the first time it has done something like that.

[KeyboardDemon]

Ok, I read the article and to me it read differently to the way the title of this thread suggests. It does seem that the emphasis is to move away from the Windows Phone hardware so that they don't keep treading on the toes of their partners, the platform and a few key 'flagship' will stay in their hands, but those key areas, ie the sub $200 phones will then be opened up to those hardware partners before those partners pull out of the market completely. It looks like the strategy is to make room for more partners to join in and therefore allow for a great number of devices to be available that use the platform without taking control of this market themselves.

The video on the other hand seemed to contradict this idea.