If Amazon can build their own fork of Android and tie it to their own app store and download offerings, why can’t Microsoft?

Microsoft could apply their Metro UI if they wanted to, tie it to their own services, development tools and Windows 8, then offer their version of Android to all handset makers as WP8.

They’d get 300,000 Android apps for the new “Windows Phone”, and handset makers could escape the $5-10/unit licensing royalties they currently pay Microsoft for Google’s versions of Android.

Crazy?  No crazier than spending hundreds of millions (at least) on the doomed WP7.  And it would hit Google right where they live.