They are surelly trying, but WP is totally dead. Even Nokia would have jumped off if MS didn't acquire them. I talk as someone who had a WP7, they entered the market to late and without several necessary features. WP7 was a disaster. Just look at the Skype situation, WP7 had the worst version (even Vita's Skype is better!) by far simply because the OS couldn't multitask so Skype only worked in foreground, you couldn't minimize it and still receive messages or calls like the Android version. WP8 fixed most of this problems, but they are still trailling behind.

OS markets tends to monopolies. No developer wants to support a lot of platforms because it takes time and time costs money. If we had 4 mobile OS, the developers would have to support all of them and it's not what they want. Devs actually want one OS for all, just one app. Currently we have a duopoly, that's not to bad but it's already 2 apps you have to made, debug, support, one in Java and the other in Objective C.

Only MS could use money from their OS industry monopoly to try and enter a different one... wait... that rings a bell.

1.2bn for windows phone ? I would not have accepted below 3bn

I don't think it's credible, but waving licensing fees it's different from giving money to develop. License it's paid based on the volume of devices sold.

M$, king of moneyhats.

Microsoft can throw as much money as they want at the phone companies, I still won't be buying a windows phone.

It doesn't matter what phone you buy. M$ will get money no matter what phone you buy.

If they got a Sony Windows Phone out in the next month I might be interested, but I think it will be the rumoured Z2 for me

I guess it's good to have more competition though

seems like they got in pretty cheap

The 2.6 billion is what M$ made from android phone sales last year wasn't it?