How will Microsoft not be able to develop Mobile Office for Android?By most reporting[1], the office team has already had versions of office for iOS (and presumably Android) ready for quite some time. Their lack of release has been an internal political battle at Microsoft based on whether to postpone them until after the equivalent office apps are ready for RT. This is one of the biggest examples of decision making that people have been criticizing Microsoft for (handicapping their non-Windows business units to provide Windows a competitive advantage; which is a sensible strategy, but that seems ill-suited longterm, as those other business units like Office now eclipse Windows in revenue).
It's entirely possible that part of Nokia releasing this phone is related to that recent shift in strategy.
How are Microsoft going to be able to maintain two mobile OSs?
Nokia already has experience in managing operating systems. I don't know how much work "porting" over all the Nokia apps was to Android, but it seems like they've done it. They already went through the experience of porting many of them over from Symbian (and alas, Maemo didn't really have much in the way of Nokia apps). I don't think this is a serious issue for their engineering organization (even aside from Microsoft's much larger engineering organization that presumably could be made available).
Are Nokia going to see this through? I think it is a smart play, if they go after it whole-heartedly like Amazon and provide a decent amount of differentiation. One could easily see Samsung going this route.
I think this is a logical play from a risk perspective. The low-end is currently where all their sales are (as the mid and high end have dried up faster than their increasing Windows Phone sales have grown); and even though the low-end isn't the desirable part of the market (see every phone manufacturer other than Apple and Samsung as examples), the effort required isn't much greater than they're already doing for the Asha lines.
I think they'll have a better chance at building an ecosystem that's piggy-backed off of Android than in building their own. I still don't know that this is a great long-term play, but it could be.
Samsung has been alleged to be heading in this direction for ages (first reported as the reasons for them releasing Bada, and later, Tizen). The new Gear 2 watch-thing runs Tizen instead of Android (which considering it's not really a stand-alone device, is probably a good place to test the waters).
It seems like the issue with Samsung taking the plunge is how much they attribute their recent success to their own products, vs. the Google ecosystem. Once they cross that threshold, they'll ship their own OS with TouchWiz on top of it. Maybe they'll similarly have an environment that can run Android apps (it's all Linux underneath).
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-office-on-ipad-its-alive-and-...