Comment: Microsoft roast burns the pundits

I once belonged to a small group that organised a "Microsoft roast", hosted in Las Vegas by my colleague John Dvorak. The subject was Microsoft's failure to launch version 1.0 of Windows.

Last week, the industry organised a rather less formal "roast" for Microsoft mobility. The occasion was the annual Mobility Developers Conference.

Since the last conference, Pocket PC Phone Edition had come and gone, leaving precious few bits of driftwood on the beach. The Stinger Smartphone had shipped; and was eclipsed by a lawsuit against Microsoft launched by its "prime partner", Sendo. And the Smartphone has been mocked, because of flaky code, poor battery life, the need for frequent reboots, and the failure of several of the design partners to ship products.

Last year, the triumph was the discovery of how many people were interested in .Net Compact Framework, and were creating shippable products using it. In the middle of the few celebrations for the release of .Net Compact Framework this year, Samsung - a leading supporter of the Smartphone - launched a rival Symbian phone, and it will soon ship another rival, Palm-based phone.

And the keynote star of the show, Orange, admitted it is sponsoring the Symbian show in London this month.

And yet... analyst firm Gartner reckons that Microsoft has already won the battle for the "corporate PDA" slot against Palm, in Europe, and that it has the branding to dominate the smartphone business. Many laughed.

It reminded me of 20 years ago, when Bill Gates sat through the public mockery of Alsop and Dvorak and Dyson and Kewney, all pouring scorn on Microsoft Windows.

But who's laughing now?

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