In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, Nadella said that Microsoft would “continue to be in the phone market” and that it would pave its own path to create the “ultimate mobile device.” In other words, Microsoft doesn’t even want to create the best phone by today’s standards — it wants to build a device that could herald a new generation of smartphones.
Of course, just because Microsoft wants to have such an impact on the smartphone industry, that doesn’t mean that it will — as we’ve seen time and time again, Microsoft’s mobile attempts have generally always missed the mark in some way.
Still, even though the company has largely failed in the smartphone market, Microsoft is in the best position that it has ever been in to make waves. The Surface computers are selling like hotcakes, and they’ve even inspired a range of knockoff devices. Not only that, but the new Surface Studio was released to quite a bit of fanfare, and it’s likely we’ll see more successful hardware products in the computer world from Microsoft, too. If the company can somehow use that momentum to woo potential smartphone buyers, we could see a radical shift in the company’s smartphone prospects.
It will certainly be interesting to see what the company comes up with. Critics have called for Microsoft to quit that smartphone market at least a few times — hopefully it can now prove those critics wrong.
