Microsoft explains (inaudible) phone behavior

19/02/2003 Written by Andrew Orlowski

Microsoft VP and smart­phone hon­cho Juha Chris­tensen says that a third party tran­scrip­tion ser­vice was to blame for cen­sor­ing ref­er­ences to his for­mer employer Sym­bian at a trade show a cou­ple of years ago.

At one of his very first pub­lic appear­ances for Microsoft, ref­er­ences to Sym­bian, which Chris­tensen helped to cre­ate while at Psion, were ren­dered as “(inaudi­ble)”, in the sub­se­quent transcript.Illus­trat­ing the strangely endur­ing pop­u­lar­ity of this story, our cov­er­age ranks as the 5^th most pop­u­lar entry for a search for “inaudi­ble” on Google.

Accord­ing to Chris­tensen, this was entirely coin­ci­den­tal. The tran­scribers sim­ply didn’t under­stand the name.

“There is no Big Brother at Microsoft,” Juha told us.

A very minor boot­note, for sure, but still more inter­est­ing than any­thing Juha and the team had to say at their press con­fer­ence today, where they shared the stage with T-​Mobile and Intel. Microsoft has pro­duced a ref­er­ence design using Intel’s XScale plat­form, which was also on show today.

But in doing so, Microsoft struck the right note, dis­avow­ing the tri­umphal­ism of yore. This strat­egy offers no hostages to for­tune and, in truth, no one feels like world dom­i­na­tion is theirs by right in this cur­rent cli­mate. Or as Siemens emphat­i­cally pointed out in the con­fer­ence imme­di­ately fol­low­ing Microsoft, “the mar­ket is shrink­ing and needs to be revived”.