In a smartphone world that was increasingly defined by Apple and Apple clones, Microsoft needed to step out. It could have, as it initially did with Windows, create an Apple clone that was better than Google’s Android platform, but instead Microsoft went back to the drawing board and created something quite different. This was a nice suprise to a lot of folks , but different is vastly riskier. That’s exactly what Apple did when it created the iPhone, which stood in sharp contrast to the other phones then in the market
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