Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, and Microsoft's gotta try to own every market under the sun. Why blame them for trying to take over? It's simply the nature of the Beast. Give them five more years, and we won't be at all surprised if they've cornered the market on PDAs, e-commerce middleware, bowling shoes, plastic coat hangers, disposable ballpoint pens, square fruit, frozen potato products, and those little novelty wall hooks that look like human fingers. From there, of course, it's just three short steps to total global domination. But hey, what can ya do, right?

So we're almost alarmingly unsurprised to hear that the Bill Gates XPerience is now out to conquer the mobile phone market. According to a Time article pointed out by faithful viewer Frank Jones, Microsoft has teamed up with Intel to license out a new mobile phone hardware reference design to manufacturers who want to build devices that are less like a phone and more like a "mini-PC." That's right, ladies and gentlemen, the Wintel experience is coming soon to a telephone near you! Gee, which three keypad buttons do you think we'll have to press to reboot the things when they crash right in the middle of a 911 call? Too bad there's only one "6" button instead of three.

But here's the really creepy bit: Juha Christensen of Microsoft's "mobility group" is quoted as saying, "we want to help people create the iMac of cell phones." Now, what does that mean, exactly? We can't shake the image of some guy walking through a parking lot gripping a 22-pound phone by its central stainless steel arm and holding its 15-inch panel against his head as he shouts into the white hemispherical base, "I'm on my way in right now-- did you want 2% or skim?" We imagine we might be taking that comment a little bit too literally, however.

Our concern, of course, is that anyone who would actually try to make the "iMac of cell phones" (compact, elegant, powerful, exquisitely well-designed and easy to use) out of Intel and Microsoft guts is going to be the same type of entity who comes up with crap like this and thinks it's the epitome of brilliant industrial design. Here's a suggestion: how about Microsoft leaves it to Apple to create the "iMac of cell phones," and instead instructs its licensees to aim a little lower-- say, the "eTower of cell phones"?