Channelweb has been leaked some more inside information about the turmoil in Project Pink, Microsoft’s ironically named Premium Mobile Experiences (PMX) group.

According to their tipster, Project Pink was doomed from the start by a too large vision and a management team with next to no mobile experience.

The project failed due to having dependencies on technologies from groups all over Microsoft, groups which often failed to deliver.

"Pink has a lot of dependencies — the marketplace is Zune, and for games it uses XNA. Every little piece uses another division’s technology," said the source. "PMX had lofty ideas and goals, but they totally failed to execute these with Pink."

In addition the base of Pink was meant to be Windows Mobile 7,  but repeated delays caused PMX to switch to Windows CE, which takes longer to implement, the source said.

After acquiring Danger for $500 million in 2008, Microsoft’s plan was to run both the Pink and Sidekick businesses and then gradually phase out the latter. Immediately after the deal, PMX made it clear that it wasn’t interested in following Danger’s creative direction and relegated Danger talent to lowly positions within PMX, the source said. When Pink ran into problems, PMX shifted resources away from the Sidekick and into Pink.

This point was underscored further when Microsoft laid off a large number of Danger employees in May as part of the first companywide job cuts in its history. Many Danger staffers left Microsoft of their own accord, and the Danger employees that remain are said to be no great fans of Pink, according to a recent Techcrunch report.

Pink is now said to be code complete, but lacks basic applications such as calendar and alarm clock, and like the ZuneHD wont have its own mobile applications marketplace.

The Pink fiasco was underlined recently when Microsoft lost thousands of user’s data, but from a Windows Mobile point of view the message is clear – while Microsoft may have a robust mobile vision, the fact is they have just not been very good at implementing it, as demonstrated in the Windows Mobile 7 delays, the slow arrival of Zune marketplace on Windows Mobile and the rocky start of Marketplace.

Whether Microsoft can turn this around remains to be seen.

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About Surur

Site Admin and Windows Phone enthusiast, he has been using Windows Mobile devices since before they were called PocketPC’s. He is currently sporting a HTC 7 Trophy.

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