So, to start this off, can you name one innovative thing that Microsoft has done in the last 10 years? One thing where they took an idea that was so unique and new that they jumped out in front of whatever market they were competing in?

It's a hard question, so take your time.

The answer: The office ribbon. I mean, really, what else could you say...

This doesn't bode well for a company that's *trying* to compete in one of the, if not the, fastest moving technology areas around: Mobile.

If you've spent any amount of time playing with mobile phones, and have touched a Windows Phone, you'll come up with one inescapable truth: It's just not very good. Sure, the UI is decent, and a huge step up from the old Windows Mobile. But that's about it.

Microsoft's draconian measures to enforce consistency have led to a bunch of "me too" phones. Sure, some have slide out keyboards. One has a pop up speaker. And the rest are like a bunch of clones.

I get why Microsoft felt they *had* to do that. Windows Mobile had no guidelines, and it led to a bunch of weird and (sometimes) crappy designs. It also was responsible for stuff like Samsung's TouchWiz and HTC's TouchFlo (and later, TouchFlo 3D, which begat Sense). So yeah, minimum hardware requirements are good.. requiring everyone to have the exact same look... that's just stifling innovation.

To be fair, stifling innovation is what Microsoft does best. After they knocked the legs out from under Netscape, they sat on IE and let it turn into a hopeless mess of bugs. After the success of Firefox (and later, Chrome) scared the beejezus out of them, it was too late for IE. Sure, it has a majority marketshare, but it's fading every day, carried along only by momentum.

Microsoft's also managed to alienate a lot of their old developer community. These were the guys who stuck with Windows Mobile when nobody else saw any value to it. The guys who learned .NET compact and the mobile C++ APIs. The people who, for years, extended and beat Windows Mobile into something useful. These are the people who had the rug pulled out from under them with the switch to XNA/Silverlight, and most of them haven't looked back. Can you blame them? Who wants to learn yet another API...?

Contrast that to the way that Google and RIM have handled things. By using Java, and a highly tuned and optimized VM, they've made it easy for developers to write once, and just tweak across different hardware and OS revisions.

The way Microsoft neglected IE is very similar to what Nokia did with Symbian. Once it had a majority marketshare, they left the platform to rot. Sure, they did innovate with hardware, the N95 was a great example. They also were ingenious in coming up with ways to clone the same hardware endlessly, and I'm sure someone in one of those dark and damp corners of Espoo is still churning out new variants of the 5800.

Like Microsoft, Nokia has continually pulled the rug out from under developers. I'm not just talking about the Symbian signed fiasco, which broke backwards compatibility. I'm talking about the silly number of frameworks that were the "way forward" for development on Symbian. For example, we've had:

• AVKON
  
• Open C/C++
  
• DirectUI
  
• Orbit
  
• QT
  

Those are just the major frameworks I can recall off the top of my head. That's a hell of a lot of times to change direction, and points to a company that's totally unfocused. On top of those, you've always had java on Symbian, which (dirty secret alert) actually outperforms a number of solutions Nokia would have had developers adopt.

Will these two companies who hate to innovate manage to turn themselves around in the Mobile marketplace? As much as I loved both Nokia's hardware and Windows Mobile, I just can't see them making a go of it in the future.