There's a bit of a buzz on the interwebs, that Microsoft's project to compete with the iPhone is having some problems.

What I find ironic is that they decided to call this project "Pink". Apple once had a project with the same name, which was to be the 'new' operating system for the Macintosh, as a replacement for System 7. Pink was to be an operating system built around an application framework which was to provide the API. This was a popular 'strategic' idea in those days, Apple, IBM and, yes even Microsoft were pursuing it.

Apple's Pink attempted to take the ideas from MacApp which had just made the transition from Object Pascal to C++, and grow them into an operating system. Larry Tesler had advocated this and John Sculley, then Apple's presidency during the "inter-regnum" period, had sunk lots of money into the project which was headquartered in the original building where the Macintosh had been developed, when it was the lair of the "Dread Pirate" Job's merry band. The project had gotten bogged down, and Sculley was on the verge of killing it, unless other 'investors' could be found. Since IBM was enamored with such things back then, a task-force was dispatched to Cupertino to look at Pink. I was tapped for the task-force because of my expertise in Object Oriented programming and visibility due to my connections with VisualAge and Smalltalk, Despite whatever technical misgivings which might have resulted, in other words they didn't listen to me, IBM bought in. The result was an alliance which formed two jointly companies which were jointly owned by IBM and Apple, Kaleida which focused on multi-media, and Taligent led by IBM Executive Joe Gugliemi, where Pink died a slow death. The longest term impact of the alliance was that it got Apple to agree to switching from the Motorola 68K family of microprocessors, which had been used in Macs until then, to the IBM PowerPC. But, since Motorola was a large IBM customer, IBM licensed the PowerPC to them, so that most Macs used IBM architected chips actually produced by Motorola until the "Dread" Pirate came back and eventually switched to using Intel chips.

Of course Microsoft's "Pink" has no relation to Apple's other than the name, but I can't help but finding this all ironic.