A few months ago, Cyanogen and Microsoft have agreed to bring some of the latter's services into the former's distribution of Android. While apps like Skype and OneNote will likely be the same experience as if the user just downloaded the apps directly, other Microsoft services could benefit from a tighter integration, such as OneDrive — although we don't have any news on that front.

Another example is Cortana, and Cyanogen's CEO has just announced that the digital assistant is coming to the next version of Cyanogen OS. One of the distribution's goals is to create a version of Android that is not reliant upon Google's services, which initially sounds like they aim to eliminate these low-level services. With this announcement, it sounds more like they just want to inject third parties in its place, with Microsoft being at least the early partner.

This is a definite win for Microsoft on the services side of things. While I'm sure that many fans of the corporation believe that Microsoft is watering down their ecosystem, the company no longer views their software platform as the bounds of their market share. This deal is clearly acceptable to them, because they made it.