The company's name alone ought to have given it away.

"With no disrespect to the smart folks at the innovative Danger, a decade-old developer of a Java-based 'hiptop' operating environment used in the T-Mobile Sidekick and other devices, Microsoft's return on the investment will probably be commensurate with what it spent: not much," Bill Snyder writes in Microsoft's mobile mistake.

Danger isn't likely to help Microsoft gain much traction in the mobile phone market against the likes of Apple and Research in Motion, Snyder continues.

"What they are doing, what the advantage is, is just not obvious," Ken Dulaney, vice president of mobile computing at Gartner said.

Snyder is irked. "Microsoft is racing to catch up with a raft of nimbler competitors as the desktop becomes less significant to the computing world. It's probably not a lot of money, but it could be a distraction -- and even chump change should be spent well."

Posted by Tom Sullivan on February 14, 2008 05:04 AM