There is still one day left at the Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona, but it's already been a doozy. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer introduced the Windows Phone 7 Series, which garnered a lot of favorable press. The specs and fuller developer/partner story will be released next month at MIX. Google CEO Eric Schmidt also delivered a keynote, where he acknowledged candidly that he believes Google's future is in the enterprise.

The big picture story at MWC is no surprise: in mobile, there is a lot of innovation, a lot of competition, a lot of platforms, a lot of opportunities -- and arguably a fair amount of fragmentation. Being early, building an ecosystem, enabling developers are all critical to a platform's success: witness RIM and the iPhone. But looking forward, to stay in the game, technologies for mobile must enable cross-platform development, support interoperability, and provide powerful tool sets.

In this regard, the Windows platform -- mobile and beyond -- will provide enormous opportunities for Microsoft partners and other developers, and flexibility for consumer and enterprise users. The demo Windows 7 Phones look flashy and have a very friendly user interface -- both great. And the Windows Phone will have greater independence -- if so desired (i.e., you choose) -- from the PC. It is also important to remember that Windows Phones (and other mobile devices) will benefit from a new generation of software -- for instance, the pieces of the cloud computing Azure platform -- that is emerging now as well. The actual mobile devices on display at MWC might arguably be the tip of the iceberg: the rest of the iceberg is made up of server and cloud software, development tools, app stores, partner ecosystems, and so on.