If the foundation is there for success, what does Windows Phone need to do to achieve success? Andrew Hoyle has been thinking about this over on CNet, and his simple answer is this. The platform needs applications. Lots of them. All the household names. And everyone needs to know they have them.

The problem is developers don't want to make more apps until there are more people using Windows Phone -- more customers equal more sales equal more money for them. But us, the customers, don't want to use it until there are more apps available. It's a vicious cycle that's extremely difficult to break, but if Microsoft wants to hit the mobile prime time, it needs to reverse it.

And the tool to (potentially) break that cycle is on the horizon. Windows 8, both on the desktop and on the mobile, will have a huge amount of synergy, more architectural symmetry with iOS and Android to aid porting, and the volume of sales to deskbound computers to lift Windows Phone with it.

It wouldn't be the first time that the desktop and mobile OS have synced up. The legendary HP200LX PDA of the mid nineties was the American equivalent of the Psion Series 3 range, but happily ran MS-DOS with a CGA compatible graphics card. If the app ran on your desktop, it ran on your PDA. Are we looking at the same vision for Windows 8? If we are, I get the feeling that it would be far more effective in 2012 than it was in 1994!

(Hp 200LX Image by AJRoach42/Flickr)