First up, here's the giant response that Marcus Ash posted on our site. Don't worry, the account is linked to his Twitter account so the authenticity checks out.

"Since I am the guy that made the initial Cortana on Android/iOS comments, I thought it would be good to jump in. And for those who wondered, yes people at Microsoft read these forums and comments because we care what our customers are saying.

First, as many commenters have pointed out, we have a lot of work left to do to make Cortana awesome on Windows Phone. We are in Beta and we are in the US and we know before we do anything else we need to scale and get Cortana out to more customers. This is our absolute top priority. This means actually launching Windows Phone 8.1 to our broad consumer audience through new phones and official updates. And getting Cortana to more countries as quickly as we can. What is being left out of the recap from these talks is that before the questions about Cortana on Android/iOS, we spent time talking about how important it is to get to more countries. Half of our customers in the Developer Preview are from outside of the US. That is amazing and is a testament to the strength of our community and the fact that we built something interesting.

Our top priority and showcase device for Cortana is Windows Phone. Any discussion or commentary about us giving up or abandoning Windows Phone is crazy talk. Our top priority is to make Cortana so fantastic that it pulls customers to Windows Phone. Period. No debate, no controversy, no throwing in the towel on our current Windows Phone customers or potential future Windows Phone customers.

After we push crazy talk about abandoning Windows Phone to the side, we have started THINKING about what's next for Cortana. And again, this is about planning and thinking and wrestling with questions about what the future will bring AFTER we make Cortana awesome for Windows Phone customers around the world. Our product design and engineering resources are being applied to making Cortana awesome for Windows Phone. So what's next is about thinking and planning, not a statement of anything we are committing to do. And unfortunately none of us have a crystal ball so this is where we will be patient, see what is happening with our customers, talk to our community and do what we think will make the most sense for innovating through products that Microsoft customers use.

We are actively thinking about what it takes to expand Cortana to Windows devices. Nothing official to report but we want our Windows device customers to experience Cortana at some point in the future. And we want the experience to be fantastic which means you have to start thinking about how Cortana should work across multiple devices. Working fantastic and being the best end-to-end experience for customers that have all Microsoft devices will be the natural first step. Our ideal future state is going to be that a customer that has a Windows PC, Windows Tablet and Windows Phone has the absolute best Cortana experience. Period. Again no debate, no controversy.

As we THINK (again, this is about thinking, refer to the above about Windows Phone about what we have committed to DO where my team is spending design and engineering time) about the future, we want to figure out what we need to do so that a Microsoft customer who has a PC/tablet but a different phone can have a great Cortana experience. We THINK we will have lots of customers on PC/Tablet in this future state that haven't seen the light and come over to Windows Phone. And we want these customers to have a great experience because if they do and we show them an even better experience on Windows Phone, there is a better chance of having them to switch to Windows Phone. If they have a bad experience on a PC/Tablet, there is no chance they will consider Windows Phone. Like it or not (I have worked on Windows Mobile and Windows Phone for 10 years so I hate hate hate it...) we are a challenger in the mobile space. This means we need to consider ideas and alternatives to breakthrough and be flexible and adaptable based on what we learn as Cortana comes to Windows Phone customers. But to be 100% clear, this is only AFTER we build something so incredible that scales to more countries on Windows Phone (where we are spending our engineering/product time) AND we make it available to even more customers that have a set of Windows devices (which is where we are just beginning to figure out our approach.)

On behalf of my team, we love the passion of our Windows Phone community. You have done an amazing job of supporting us in the early days of Cortana and it gives us motivation to continue to build something great for you. There is no substitute for action so watch the next four months and you will see that we are dead serious about giving you the best personal assistant on any Smartphone, something so great that you will convince everyone you know to get a Windows Phone. And if that happens, then we can stop early future speculative talk about Android/iOS :)

Thanks again for engaging in a dialog.

-Marcus"