The Danger Acquisition: All About the Services, Baby

You know us. We can't pass up an opportunity to say “I told you so.” It's a weakness, really. So when Ina Fried reported on Steve Ballmer's comments during Mix '08 (the same place where Ballmer gave us Monkey Dance Redux), our beady, self-aggrandizing eyes lit up when we came to the section about the acquisition of Sidekick-maker Danger:

“The Danger acquisition is really about building up an application and service aspect on top of our Windows Mobile platform,” he said. “Danger is really a service application experience and we want to make sure we get that in market on a great set of phones.”

Sounds a bit like what we said immediately after the announcement:

What Microsoft is really interested in, it seems, is Danger's services - even though the Sidekick is the simplest of smart phones these days, it does a stellar job of storing its data “in the cloud” -- exactly where it belongs.

Crowing aside, Fried's post is also interesting because it addresses a concern that many had with both the Danger acquisition and the attempted Yahoo grab: these companies don't use Microsoft tech, while Microsoft almost exclusively uses Microsoft tech. Will Microsoft port everything over to their stuff? Well - eventually, but it sounds like they have their heads on straight when it comes to timelines. Microsoft is perfectly willing to run open source stuff for a time so they can focus their efforts on services that will be more immediately apparent to the end user. Good call.