Summary: Links of interest about failing crown jewels

● Finger crossing won't lure iPhone coders to Windows Mobile

Steve Ballmer famously derided the iPhone when it was first released, telling USA Today: "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share."

He was wrong.

In an equally famous CNBC-TV interview that has garnered over 2.3 million views on YouTube, Ballmer laughingly dismissed the iPhone.

Wrong again.

Today, Windows Mobile continues to lose market share, with no real relief expected until Windows 7 Mobile appears next spring. But in that same CNBC-TV video, Balmer says about Windows Mobile: "I like our strategy, I like it a lot."

Three strikes, Steve.

● FYI: Not so funny Microsoft bug that hosed our company's product because a "function randomly returns incorrect results".

This applies to Server 2008 and Vista. The bug is in any API call to compare unicode strings. Just so you understand an example of the hilarity that ensued: "because of this problem, Exchange Server 2007 may stop responding or may encounter index corruption." Hunting down this bug required epic QA analysis, since the bug only happens "When the mapped section that has the incorrect DACL settings is accessed by lots of threads at the same time". Lots of threads? Really, Microsoft? One of the work-arounds was to disable all but one processor. The bug caused one of our customers to get different business reports depending on whether anyone had started up MS Paint during the data analysis.

● Is your netbook small enough for Windows 7?

We've known for some time that Windows 7 Starter Edition will only be made available to original equipment manufacturers, but the licensing detail covering what machines Microsoft will allow those OEMs to install the OS onto has been pretty scarce.

At a recent Wall Street analyst meeting, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer would appear to have spilled the beans regarding Windows 7 Starter Edition licensing. Ballmer insisted that the license will determine exactly what is and is not a netbook: "it's got to have a super-small screen" he said, adding "it has to have a certain processor..."