Another day, another ex-Microserf complaint.

Apparently up in Redmond Washington, the Microsoft castle only serves one type of everything, in the cafeteria, and it's the same thing that is served at the restaurants in the neighborhood, too.  What am I talking about?  Ex-Microsoft employee and Windows Phone evangelist / general manager Charlie Kindel complains that Google's UI is nowhere as smooth as WP7, and that Google will eventually lose out, because of F-R-A-G-M-E-N-T-A-T-I-O-N.

Hmm.  So let's line up the current and former Microsoft employees who have complained about F-R-A-G-M-E-N-T-A-T-I-O-N, shall we?

• To reiterate, we have Charlie Kindel proselytizing for the WP platform by talking about problems of fragmentation.
• We have Chris Weber saying, "Fragmentation in Android is going to end in a poor consumer experience."
• Then there's the bizarre oxymoron that Stephen Elop asserted, when he suggested that Android looked all the same, and therefore, "if it’s too hard to differentiate on a platform, commoditization steps in. But then differentiation starts to creep back in through fragmentation."
• Current WP lead, Andy Lees says that, "we have much more coherency in the totality of what somebody gets when they buy our phone."
• And finally, we have Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer suggesting that Android phones are "pretty inconsistent, don't look alike, don't work..."

So let me say this about all this fuss:

BULL.

First, Microsoft is being hypocritical on the issue of fragmentation, when it has three different browsers with at least 10% market share mixed with three different desktop OS versions with at least 10% market share.  If that's not convoluted, then I don't know what is.

And what about the iPhone, with four different models available for sale - they sell refurbished 3G, 3G-S, 4 and new 4S phones - with three iOS platforms?

Really though, Elop must be an idiot. If he thought that Android hardware "looked all the same", then it must be embarrassing to know that a third of the WP7 phones share the same hardware underpinnings with other platforms: his own company's Lumia 800 was actually the N9 running Meego; the HTC HD7 is a revised Desire HD; the Samsung Focus S is nearly a copy of the Galaxy S-II Skyrocket; the HTC Titan and HTC Sensation XL are based off the same form factor and hardware.

If fragmentation were an issue, it is curious how Android has been able to maintain its growth for over three years, now, don't you think?  If anything, Android's growth has accelerated since Microsoft introduced its WP7 platform, and October 2010 marked the first wave of 2-year contract renewals from first-adopters of G1.

Spot the fragmentation effect on Android

In short, Microsoft's current and former employees are ALL BULL.