Microsoft Said To Be Making An Investment In Cyanogen

 

Yes, Cyanogen, the makers of the CyanogenMod, the Android user experience that has been installed on tens of millions of handsets now. If true, it does show some very aggressive intent from Redmond.
Talks about such an investments are not new, however.
Reports as far back as this past August claimed that Microsoft was interested in Cyanogen. Not much was heard since then, other than the apparent confirmation that Cyanogen declined an acquisition offer from Google in October.
Now, however, the Wall Street Journal reports citing people familiar with the matter that Microsoft is a minority investor in a round of equity financing worth around $70 million.
While Microsoft has been making its software widely available on other platforms, as opposed to say Google or Apple, this move could be seen as an effort to expand these possibilities, or even reign in the competition — as in Google, the makers of Android.
Cyanogen have made it no secret that they intend to take Android away from Google, and create a version of the mobile operating system without any strings attached.
That is to say, bundled Google apps and services.
At the very least, it provides Microsoft with an opportunity to offers its products like OneDrive, Bing, Skype, OneNote and more by bundling them into the various Cyanogen releases.
With Windows the various versions of Windows 10 on the horizon, this could get interesting.