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Microsoft introduces Windows Phone 7 Series, a complete ground up rebuild and reimagine. Good move, realizing that they needed to rethink and acting on it. The challenge will be delivering from within a corporate culture that is still Windows-centric. This will probably turn out pretty well because Microsoft can make the hard choices when it has to, though not as well as it needs to because there will be a large internal cohort which doesn't realize it has to.

Big Telcos are forming a consortium, the Wholesale Applications Community, to offer unified app store competition for Apple and Android. This will probably fail. First reason - intercorporate politics. Seriously, AT&T, Verizon, China Mobile, NTT and many others are going to present a coherent united front? If you can keep the executives out and only the gearheads in, maybe. Good luck with that. Second reason - not a lot of money in it. Apple is believed to be breaking even on the app store and the development community. The real money is the hardware and the real value of the app store is to advance the utility of the hardware. Maybe the phone makers have a motive, some of them are taking a "silent partner" role in the consortium, but they aren't going to work together easily either. The telcos seem to have little motive either. Just being against X, in this case Apple, is not a business plan.