Microsoft Living Dangerously, Buys Sidekick Company

Microsoft just announced at the 2008 Mobile World Congress that it will be acquiring Danger Inc., the company who created and supports the popular Sidekick range of handhelds offered by T-Mobile. Microsoft’s current mobile offering, Windows Mobile 6 (both Professional and Standard) is often slammed for being too ‘businessy’, with a bigger focus on the enterprise user and not enough multimedia/consumer-friendly features.

This makes total sense to me. Microsoft’s OS currently sucks for consumers, compared to multimedia- and consumer-friendly Symbian OS and more recently, RIM’s Blackberry OS and the iPhone. Rather than attempt to overhaul their OS, which is rumored to not be updated fully until 2009, they’re simply going to buy Yahoo! and Danger, both top-level for mobile consumer-friendly services and products.

Genius. Completely genius. Just hope they don’t screw it up.