This is the galaxy note 10 and beyond being the latest and greatest flagship from Samsung with upgraded specs and some gorgeous new color options this phone is also the clearest example of the partnership Samsung and Microsoft have built over the last few years it's pretty uncharacteristic of me to buy a thousand-euro flagship like this especially at launch but I'm really excited about this partnership first a bit of history the samsung microsoft partnership weirdly enough starts with the patent litigations and legal disputes.
The old Microsoft was famous for because as recently as in 2013 Microsoft collected over a billion dollars a year from Samsung for Android related patents the company owned and by the way they reportedly also collected five to thirteen dollars per Android phone from almost all device makers like HTC Sony and LG to making billions a year without the need to do much work themselves seemed like a brilliant business and yet in 2014 when Satya Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft he decided to shift away from their strategy Satya saw the writing on the wall mobile phones continue to get more and more important and Google strong mobile portfolio started hurting Microsoft Gmail threatened Outlook Google Drive threatened onedrive Google Docs threatened office band so on and while the Microsoft products still reigned supreme on desktops and in the enterprise users were starting to shift towards the more mobile optimized Google Apps on phones seeing the threat clearly the new CEO said Microsoft had to embrace a mobile-first cloud-first approach at all costs and put together a battle plan consist of two giant steps first the new Microsoft looked at all of those incoming billions in royalty payments from full makers and said nope they were not going to continue collecting those instead they convinced almost all device makers to have Microsoft apps like onedrive and office pre-installed on their devices.
Those phone makers of course happily accepted the deal which gave Microsoft ABS unprecedented distribution on Android phone the likes of which probably only Google has ever seen and second Microsoft got to work to ensure that their mobile apps would actually become good they were three key companies sunrise accompli and thunder lists hip independent talented teams making arguably some of the best calendar email and to-do list management apps on iOS and Android I like to think of those three categories as kind of the Holy Trinity of productivity work a perfect match for Microsoft's portfolio and the newly acquired teams were quickly put in charge of most of Microsoft's core mobile apps a complete founder took over Outlook mobile before he rose in the ranks to lead the entire office group and the wonderous team in Berlin was tasked with building back results very own to-do app for example and combined these two steps so being pre-installed across devices around the world and also having vastly improved that quality they really worked wonders for Microsoft the company started rolling out app after app on these platforms and people started taking them seriously as a mobile player.
But their integrations with Samsung and other device makers were really basic at first not only were they not exactly voluntary with most device makers pre installing Microsoft apps simply to avoid hundreds of millions of dollars i royalty payments they were also mostly just that pre-installed bloatware without any significant optimizations or any deep integrations but as such a consistently pushed for the embrace of mobile platforms as well as for Microsoft to see other companies as partners and not just enemies and competitors.
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