Microsoft explains (inaudible) phone behavior

3GSM 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 5th 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". ®

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