They say imitation is the best form of flattery. Obviously when a competitor hits on something good ; you can either continue to ignore that and keep focussing your energies on something that is obviously not working ; or keep your ego aside and take up his concept with a vengeance and improve upon it. Microsoft has taken the second path but its not going to be easy.

They are planning to call it Skymarket and will obviously cater to handsets running on Windows Mobile 7. Unfortunately for Microsoft , Apple knows exactly on what kind of devices their apps have to operate on - its either iPhones or iPods. There is no third player in the field. But take Microsoft for instance. Their Windows Mobile runs on a host of different types of handsets from different manufacturers each with varying dimensions and capacities. Some have touchscreen , others dont. Some have dual screens, others make do with a comparatively smaller single one.

Some have GPS, others don't; same goes for wi-fi, 3G, Bluetooth features, user interface, carrier policies, etc. Which means some apps will work on all phones, and some apps will only work on a small subset.

Writing apps for such a mis-match of products cant be easy without turning it into bloatware; Which would of course result in driving even more frustrated consumers away and towards Apple. Lets see how Microsoft attempts to deal with this problem when Skymarket does release.

Source