WP (Score 1)

I just can't imagine MS abandoning WP. It would not make sense. Not today, nor tomorrow.
From the consumers perspecitve, however, I fail to see how and why anyone would opt to buy a phone with a 12 month usable lifespan.
I got myself a Dell Streak 5" phone. It was running Android 2.2 and was eventually uppgraded to 2.3. Dell abandoned their Streak line of devices and had it not been for the open-source nature of Android I would have been out of options.
Windows Phone 7.x owners must be pretty unhappy inside; they got themselves devices that can not be updated to any meaningful extent. The same seems to be happening to WP8 owners.
Don't get me wrong; this strategy has worked well for the manufacturers for many years! Users buy new phones when the old ones become obsolete. In the smartphone-market, however, the cost for upgrading is high. If the user is forced to buy a new phone every year, the consumers will navigate towards cheaper low-end devices. And belive me: That is not what the manufacturers want! Nor do they want their customers turn to open-source alternatives when their devices no longer recieve new updates.