Inside Microsoft’s top secret ‘Pink’ smartphone failure
Friday, October 09, 2009 - 10:33 AM EST"Earlier this week, an anonymous tipster leaked the news that Microsoft's top secret Pink project, aimed to take on the iPhone just as the Zune targeted the iPod, was 'near death and probably will be canceled,'" Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider.
"Another source has now spilled even more details about the internal crisis brewing within the company and how the failure of Pink relates to iPhone, Google's Android, and Windows Mobile," Dilger reports.
"The report is bad news for Microsoft given that less than two years ago it paid a reported $500 million to acquire Danger, the developer behind the T-Mobile Sidekick. Microsoft's 2008 acquisition of the company was initially seen as an effort to breathe life into its struggling Windows Mobile division, which had been rapidly losing smartphone market share to RIM's BlackBerry in the enterprise and Apple's iPhone among consumers," Dilger reports.
"It was later revealed that Microsoft had converted Danger into 'Pink,' a top secret project operating independently from Windows Mobile, with the intent of directly challenging the iPhone. This mimicked Microsoft's earlier strategy of launching the Zune against Apple's iPod, which the company did while assuring its PlaysForSure hardware and music store partners that Zune wouldn't have any impact their existing business," Dilger reports. "As it turned out, Zune had no impact on the iPod but completely destroyed the remains of Microsoft's PlaysForSure partnerships."
Dilger reports, "Our inside source now says the same thing is happening to Pink, even before Microsoft can finish it. That's particularly problematic because Microsoft is already facing a schism between its Windows Mobile and Zune platform groups, their differing first party software development, and their business models for third party software and software stores."
Read the extensive full article- highly recommended - here.


This doesn't come as a suprise to me...