A cease fire between Google and Microsoft might finally be in the cards. After the two companies buried the hatchet last week and agreed to resolve all pending patent disputes, hope might be on the horizon for much more. A long standing inconvenience for Windows Mobile users, Google has, to this day, adamantly refused to bring any of its services to Microsoft"s Mobile OS.
Despite the immense popularity of service such as Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Hangouts and more, Windows Phone users have had to make do with either unofficial third party apps or use alternatives due to Google"s insistence that Windows Phone"s marketshare is not large enough to justify the development of apps for the platform. This decision could, of course, also be motivated by the company trying to stifle the growth of Microsoft"s aspiring platform.
All of that, however, might soon change. An Arabic site is now reporting that Google allegedly has plans to attend Microsoft"s event this week to announce the impending release of some/all of its services on the Windows 10 platform.
While the site"s source did not detail whether this would be Windows 10 or Windows 10 Mobile, due to the fact that most Google services are already, in some form or another, available on the desktop, the site is claiming that the announcement is specific to the mobile OS. Moreover, since this announcement is obviously referring to the store, given Microsoft"s push for the Universal Windows Platform, it is very likely that if Google brings its apps to the desktop Store, they will be Universal Apps and, thus, also be functional on the phone.
Given the tumultuous history between the two tech giants, this news might seem a little hard to swallow but, put in the perspective of Microsoft"s increasingly amicable relations with not only Google but also Apple, and the company"s push toward being more platform agnostic under its new CEO Satya Nadella, this news is certainly much, much more likely today than it was a year ago.