Translation: English to Chinese

Instructor: Tsueifen Chen

Microsoft's Smartphones Not Good Enough: Rich Jaroslovsky (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/microsoft-s-windows-phone-7-isn-t-good-enough-rich-jaroslovsky.html)

In technology, being late can be as disastrous as being wrong. And that’s the battle Microsoft Corp. is now fighting with the release of Windows Phone 7, its new smartphone operating system.

The good news is that the software is generally a winner: fun, easy to use and not just another iPhone wannabe. The bad news is that the good news may not matter.

Microsoft hasn’t just lost market share since the iPhone inaugurated the modern smartphone era, it has seen its position implode, falling to 5 percent in the second quarter from 22 percent in 2004.

The company simply can’t afford to be shut out of the booming market. Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker predicts that within five years, more users will connect to the Internet on mobile devices than the desktop computers that Microsoft has dominated for decades.

Unless the company can establish a beachhead in mobile, it’s facing a long slow slide into irrelevance.