[monkeyboy]

Could be good, could easily be real bad...
I don't think MS has ANY track record of entering the same market with its OEMs and and not stifling competition and killing off that OEM market. MS hopefully will figure out how to avoid its previous mistakes and the similar mistakes of Palm.

PalmOS was of course the king of PDA OSs and had a VERY active OEM community. In fact many of the real innovations to PalmOS came from Palm's OEMs: including hi-res screens (Palm was stuck on 160x160), memory cards, and of course the PalmOS phone. Important PalmOS OEMs for these advances were Sony, Handspring, Qualcomm/Kyocera and Samsung. However, Palm bought Handspring which then led to the Treo, and in the process killed the rest of the PalmOS OEM market -- really too bad, because for example, the Samsung PalmOS phones were very credible and popular devices. And PalmOS development and innovation ground to a snails pace (yes I know part of the problem was the lost of control of PalmOS to Access).

Anyways, the danger is that MS's entrance to the WM phone market may cause companies like HTC to abandon WM, or at least pushing cutting edge innovation on that platform. Which would be terrible since HTC et al has clearly been the most innovative force on the WM scene. May be the last straw that makes HTC jump nearly entirely to Android.... leaving MS to its stagnant WM without the innovative forces that MS itself seems to lack...