It almost seems too blasé to say that a lot rests on the success of Windows Mobile 7. The update to the smartphone OS has been a long time in development and, going by appearances and what rumors we have, has some time left to go before it’s fit for release. WM7 won’t get out of the door until September 2009, by some accounts, which leaves plenty of time for 3G iPhones, new BlackBerries and more Android than you can shake a stylus at. The reason is purely the scale of Microsoft’s development targets: making the OS finger friendly, introducing camera-recognised motion gestures and borrowing the media capabilities and slick appearance of Vista.

Of course, the problem with saving yourself for big, headline releases is that you’re dependent on what can be your weakest link: the people who work on, or just generally know about, your project. Recently the carefully constructed edifice of silence around WM7 appears to have been breaking down. Back in January this year, screenshots, details and features of the upcoming mobile OS contained in an internal Microsoft document were leaked to someone outside the company; meanwhile, only last week, one of Microsoft’s own MVPs, pocketnow’s Brandon Miniman, seemingly broke his NDA agreement in attempting to rebuke criticism of WM7 from fellow blogger Chuong Nguyen.

Perhaps I’m too forgiving (Will Microsoft be? The rebuke post was quickly pulled from the pocketnow forums), but I’d like to think that Brandon acted more out of frustration than from wanting to show off insider knowledge. Frustration, that is, around how little Microsoft let known about their work-in-progress, about how easily that allows rumor and criticism to spread. I’m no Windows Mobile apologist - I’ve made no bones of my opinion that the OS needs to vastly overhaul its usability and appearance if it wants to turn around its ongoing marginalisation in the face of glossy rivals such as the iPhone - but I do want to give myself the biggest choice of mobile devices possible.

Apple’s development arc, for all their usual secrecy, is relatively obvious, and any “mysterious” or unexpected upgrades are regularly announced at keynote events both regular and impromptu. I know that if I buy an iPhone today, within months it will be able to access Exchange, for instance. Windows Mobile 7, though, is such a closed box that we’ve no idea whether we should be holding off from signing a two-year contract on something else, or hanging around to see what Microsoft come up with.

My colleague Vincent Nguyen is a member of Mobius, and like Miniman sometimes gets to see pre-announcement hardware and software that he’s unable to talk about to the rest of us. When I asked him if he had anything to say for this, I got a pretty short “no comment”. But I reckon the Mobius crowd, quite probably the MVPs too, are all pretty frustrated at Miniman right now. They’d all like to document what Microsoft have been working on - I bet the engineers on the project would love to answer back to all their friends waving iPhones at them - but the sheer scale of the development, testing cycles, negotiation with all of the company’s hardware partners and the carriers, all of it adds up to a glacial pace. At least when viewed from the outside, anyway.

Ironically, even if Microsoft threw open their doors and showed us where they were up to, what’s holding them back, they’d still get criticism. That’s what comes with being one of the oldest in the game, of having perhaps the biggest development team and of working with the most different partners; you lead for a while, until your mass holds you back, and then you play catch-up and hope your experience and user base is enough to maintain your position. Don’t doubt it, Windows Mobile 7 could be something very special indeed - goodness knows it has to be - the problem is just letting us see it.

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