I doubt this alliance means Microsoft is throwing Windows Mobile. For a start, we still have to see what kind of software comes out of this.

As a matter of fact, Pocket Office has usually kind of sucked, being outfeatured in nearly every aspect by the competition (in my Palm days even DataViz's product had better binary format compatibility -- so I guess that's still the case today; if it's not and they have made a huge heap please tell).

Also, right now I believe that what what we're going to see is a web application. Unless very well executed (e.g. host filesystem integration) I don't see how can that compete with traditional office suites. After all, we already have Google Docs out there and not even the iPhone office suite makers saw that as competition (people who use Google Docs are not going to buy a full office suite either way).


Not to say that Microsoft knows Symbian faces certain death and it's not a likely competitor to the iPhone-killer Windows Mobile MS has in mind, but that's still debatable.