2 months ago, the Chinese government had to raid Microsoft’s Chinese offices due to some security concerns and an anti-trust campaign regarding that. This was the first time when Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella visited China after becoming the CEO. While resolving the security issues regarding Microsoft in China was his main objective, there are rumors that Microsoft’s and Xiomi’s CEOs had held a secret meeting there.
The first thing that comes to our minds, is about the possibility of Xiomi’s devices being powered by Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS, which would be a great market for Microsoft to extend to, because Xiomi has already became the leading mobile phone seller in China, which is a big market. Xiomi is considered as “the Apple of China”, because of the build quality, and the combination of their own skinned Android OS that delivers above-par performance on their devices.
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Another thing that comes to our mind, is that it would be kind of awkward to see a Xiomi device having a tiled homescreen, a company that was started as a developer of a custom Android ROM, MIUI. This was the foundation ROM that Xiomi has based all its devices on, and jumping on to the Windows Phone OS, would be kind of awkward.
Though nothing official has been said about this, we are still waiting for some announcements.