Microsoft's Windows Mobile has been around much longer than the iPhone. But since the iPhone's launch, it has struggled to convince people that it will be a dominant player in the smartphone market going forward. First, there are a range of usability challenges that must be addressed -- Windows Mobile 7 is supposed to address them (or many of them).

But the trio of iPhone, BlackBerry and the forthcoming Android threaten to obscure Windows Mobile in another way -- at least in the US market -- by offering a range of compelling software applications for their respective smartphones. Apple has already demonstrated the importance of this, and BlackBerry is playing catch up on the software front. Android showed the first winners of its developer competition and formally announced its own marketplace for software.

Waking up to the importance of building a marketplace for mobile software, Microsoft is reportedly planning its own Apps Store-like experience ("Skymarket"), according to these job postings. Skymarket will apparently consolidate distribution of Windows Mobile apps for consumers and business users to make the OS more appealing to consumers and competitive from a software standpoint.