To clarify, they aren't shutting down Cortana completely - they're ending support for the standalone Cortana apps, which makes sense. What I find more interesting is how they're handling their smart speaker partnership: > ...we’ve worked closely with Harman Kardon to create a Bluetooth-enabled device transition plan that we hope will help ease the impact of this change. Customers who receive a firmware update from Ha…
> they're ending support for the standalone Cortana apps, which makes sense This is actually the hardest part for me to understand. They want me to drag a Win10 laptop everywhere to use the assistant instead of just using my phone?
[0] I say this with lament, because it was IMO a legitimately good phone OS. My Lumia 920 is still my backup phone, 8 years later, because the ones I got after that died before replacement. But the death was certainly not a surprise. Once they started adding more features to Android apps than existed in the Windows Phone versions, the writing was on the wall about where the money was going.