Lenovo Plays Switzerland in Battle Between Microsoft and Google

Lenovo is in the process of buying Motorola from Google, so it came as something of a surprise this week when the Chinese electronics giant was listed among the new companies building a Windows Phone.

“We like this position of being a tech company that leverages many different partnerships,” Chief Marketing Officer David Roman told Re/code in an interview at Mobile World Congress. “Over time, market realities sort out what is most successful, what is less successful.”

The company is just as experimental on the PC side, doing computers running Chrome OS and Android, in addition to many shapes of Windows PCs.

Roman said that the company started out with a Chromebook for education, but sees additional opportunities beyond that market.

“How big that is I don’t know,” he said.

What is clear, he said, is that the appeal of Chrome OS has more to do with the fact that it is easily controlled and managed than as a way to offer cheaper computers.

“The early assumption in industry was [Chrome OS was a] way of making a cheap laptop,” Roman said. “That’s going away. You can make a cheap laptop anyway.”

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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