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It's fascinating to look at the technology world and Microsoft's role in it through the lens of the battle for control of the smart phone market. This struggle illustrates both how Microsoft is trying to take a leadership position with aggressive new offerings (while breaking with many products and strategies of its past) and how far behind the company has fallen. In this context (and in this market segment instance), Microsoft is like IBM in the 1980s and 90s -- an industry titan trying to regain relevance despite what once seemed like insurmountable technological, market, leadership, and financial advantages. IBM re-invented itself as a services giant. Microsoft may reinvent itself as a cutting-edge leader in smart phone technology (among other things). If Microsoft's smart phone efforts turn out to be a powerful and alluring Phoenix rising from the ashes of Windows CE/Mobile, its success should be applauded and copied, like all good strategies. After all, this is the very path that has made Apple so successful. Things look bleak for the underdog from Redmond ... Microsoft is in the midst of rebooting its phone offerings with the Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7S) technology and brand (see the Windows Phone site here; the WP7S developer site here ). Looking at the main developer page of WP7S, someone who had been asleep for the last few years would be shocked at how the company has moved to a position of reacting to the market. Two items stand out: WP7S apps will be screened by Microsoft and the device itself will be loaded and synced using specialized PC software (relying on the Zune desktop program). The official ways to get apps will be through this method -- it's unclear if there will be "backdoor" to get apps on the phones (see this Engadget article for more details on the Marketplace and how the phones will operate). Will this result in blogger/commenter backlash due to inevitable app rejections/delays as Apple has been? Microsoft says the approval process will be much more transparent from Apple's, but a rejection is still a rejection. Will it result in the desire for a segment of users to "jailbreak" their WP7S phones? While the answers are not known yet, it looks like Microsoft is adopting many Apple strategies and will face many of the issues that its rival must deal with today. -The social networking feeds highlighted are all non-Microsoft properties. On the main WP7S page, there are links (badges) to three social networking sites: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Pragmatic? Absolutely. Does it say something about Microsoft's inability to dominate, or even have significant share of the social networking market? Yes. Hopefully, for Microsoft's sake, the success of the WP7S platform will be much better than its social networking efforts to date. Love, hate, or feel ambivalent about the new user interface (UI) for WP7S phones and the hardware limitations (approved form factors), the new platform, with its abilities and limitations, demonstrates exactly how much Microsoft is following mindshare leaders like Apple and Google's Android.