Depends. The price for moving all the porting effort to Microsoft is inflexibility. For example, WP7 supported only Qualcomm SoC and nothing else. Meanwhile, i

Depends. The price for moving all the porting effort to Microsoft is inflexibility. For example, WP7 supported only Qualcomm SoC and nothing else. Meanwhile, in the Android world, the vendors (mostly SoC vendors) had to do engineering, but they could use Exynos or Tegra or any other SoC they wanted. Another significant part of the engineering is customization. It is not that we, the geeks, want the manufacturers to customize their Android builds (see the popularity of the Nexus and AOSP builds for other phones). But they have a choice and they chose to do it. In the Windows world, they don't have such a choice. So it is not a black/white. It is a set of compromises and constrains on a curve. It is up to a vendor to pick the optimal point, after weighting costs and benefits.