[frankenbike]

So, here we are with Microsoft in hand to hand combat with Apple over the smartphone market, and MS stupidly slashes their own wrists. Again.

"I can get an iPhone and there are thousands of apps I can get for 99 cents, or I can get a WinMo phone and spend $25 for a similar app".

There is only one reason Microsoft doesn't want to have software priced at 99 cents. Because their cut of the sale is measured in $0.xx, and they can't conceive of a way to turn that into a profit center. But people buy most apps on iPhones on impulse, not as long term "investments in productivity".

The people at Microsoft are completely unable to imagine that non-enterprise users don't like to spend money in large quantities. They do like to buy large quantities of stuff for very little money. They need to get with the program, or get out.

Microsoft's insistence that smartphones were simply a means of further marketing Microsoft Office, was what left the consumer market for mobile information devices wide open for Apple to come in with a consumer based touch screen device that is blowing them out of the market. Microsoft's crap mobile email, mobile web, mobile music, mobile media and mobile interface were only tolerable through pricey third party apps and free apps created by frustrated users.

I'm a getting-less-dedicated-every-day WinMo user who is really starting to root for Android getting its act together so it can blow WinMo out of the water (by the time I buy my next phone). Microsoft's feeble catch up attempts in the mobile market need to be euthanized to end its terminal cranial/rectal inversion disease.

The only things that stop me from buying an iPhone are AT&T's horrible 3G coverage in Southern California (CDMA rules here), and Apple's even more-fascist-than-Microsoft's business/tech philosophy.