Honestly, first Forbes and now Microsoft - Google’s cellphone software engineers are taking a beating lately, as pundits and providers alike take issue with the company’s potential move into providing handset OS and applications.  Today it’s the turn of Bill Gates - normally so shy and retiring - who is reported as saying of Google’s ambitions:

“They’ve introduced about 30 different products; they have one profit-making product. So you’re now making a prediction without ever seeing the software that they’re going to have the world’s best phone and it’s going to be free?”

Commenting to the New York Times, Gates seemed confident that Microsoft’s 10-percent share of the mobile OS market was unlikely to be threatened by anything Google could conjure. 

“The phone is becoming way more software intensive, and to be able to say that there’s some challenge for us in the phone market when its becoming software-intensive, I don’t see that” Bill Gates

To be honest, I partially share that prediction.  Not because I don’t think Google has the skill or determination to put together a cellphone software package, but because I don’t think they’d deign to compete on Microsoft’s terms.  The handsets that use the Windows Mobile OS are all smartphones of one sort or another, and from Google’s past form they’d be more likely to aim for the (bigger) consumer market.