Smartphones 175 relationships with carriers and knowledge of operator billing, which his team didn't have; and the Danger team knew how to make handheld hardware ­ something the Xbox group had realized was a special skill when they had tried to build the Zune. Allard argued that Microsoft needed to have its own ecosystem ­ an idea that had worked with the Xbox ­ and most of all needed to be selling the hardware, because that, not software, was where the profits were in mobile. Buy Danger, he told Ballmer. Knook and Flowers disagreed: it was too expensive, it would require difficult integration of an entire company, and building hardware wasn't Microsoft's skill. Also, Allard's plan would lead to incompatible user experiences between Pink and Windows Mobile, even if the underlying software was the same. If Microsoft was going to invest so much money in mobile, shouldn't it go into the core platform? Ballmer gave the nod to Allard.