Originally posted on http://www.ayg.com/wireless/Article.po?type=Article_Archives&page=985984

It's easy to paint a picture of Microsoft as an überconglomerate, with employees wearing the chains of evil while churning out products that you will use whether you like it or not.

At the first Möbius conference, an invitation-only event thrown by Microsoft's Mobility Group, the perception of malevolence was tempered with the hard fact that Microsoft will be producing some earth-shaking mobile products in the next few years, and that there are real human beings who roam the many campuses of Bill Gates' empire.

As far as Microsoft's Mobility Group is concerned, it's all about user experience. The point was hammered home repeatedly, from the opening keynote by Juha Christensen, Vice President of Mobility Marketing, Sales and Solutions, to the various product team managers who came in to describe how Pocket PC has changed from its original release to the impending Merlin version, or Pocket PC 2002.

"Microsoft has a unique position to provide an end-to-end solution for wireless, from the end-user devices, to the software that runs on them, to the servers that deliver information to those devices," Christiansen said.

He's not kidding. PPC2K2 is a vast improvement from the first version, which was arguably more powerful than the Palm OS but light-years behind in usability. Not only does the new build feature a terminal services client, allowing a user to access a desktop machine from the PPC device, but includes an input protocol called Block recognizer, which Palm users will immediately recognize as another implementation of Graffiti. The Microsoft SmartPhone, or The Phone Formerly Known as Stinger, is astonishing in the beta phase, and crams a whole lot of functionality into its 176 x 220 screen.

Then, there's Visual Studio .NET, which is in Beta 2. This tool, which allows developers to build online applications once and allows the server to do the heavy lifting of rendering out the code for whatever device is accessing the information, will out-and-out blow developers' minds.

So, why would Microsoft need to invite a bunch of writers out to Washington to see these products?

"Simply, we just wanted you to have the information necessary to make a fair judgement on the products we have coming out," said Beth Goza, Project Marketing Manager for the Microsoft Mobility Group. "A lot of the people attending were from sites that had nothing to do with Pocket PC, but we felt it necessary that we needed to present our side of the story, and make a decision on how to report on the technology for themselves."