I wish I could say that Robbie Bach, the guy in charge of Microsoft's mobile effort, told tales out of school during his roundtable discussion at Microsoft's Open House Event last week. He did not. During the hour-long chat, which occurred just hours after the Windows Mobile 6.5 rollout, Bach, who serves as Microsoft's President of Entertainment and Devices Division, stayed on message. He didn't share about Windows Mobile 7, and he scooted around questions regarding all future product plans. Instead, he offered only that the company was pleased and excited with the day's accomplishments: Windows Mobile 6.5 and a bunch of new phones.

That said, one part of the afternoon's discussion stuck with me long after the weary-looking Bach ambled out of the room. The more I thought about it, well, the more I couldn't stop thinking about it. It was when Bach got into the numbers. No, not the total number of Windows Mobile phones sold last year (I think he said 17 million) and not the number of new Windows Mobile 6.5 devices launched that day (by my count there were at least four). It's that other discussionthe one we cannot get away from whenever we talk about smartphones: How many mobile applications are there?

Concurrent with the Windows Mobile 6.5 update is access to Microsoft's brand-new application Marketplace. This move surprised no one, since every single smartphone vendor has to have something to compete with Apple's AppStore. Bach talked about the current Window Mobile smartphone market (the one that existed prior to the day's launch). According to Bach, there are 20,000 Windows Mobile apps on the market today. This number, to be honest, shocked me, perhaps because I knew that Microsoft's app marketplace had launched that day with just a bit over 260 applications. The gap was so huge that I had to ask Bach about it, especially because he had also just told us that porting applications, which is, for the most part, pretty simple, "is not a major development effort." If there were so many apps and development is so simple, why didn't the Marketplace launch with 10,000 apps? That number, which I essentially plucked out of the air, was a bit unfair, but Bach's answer wasn't much better: He told me that it "takes time to get the development environment out to people" and that "people were focusing on other things," which is almost the same as saying, "people were busy."

It's what he said next, though, that really got me thinking. I guess Bach felt a bit defensive, because he began to pick apart the very idea of application counting. "The fascination with the absolute number is really nothing but a fascination," said Bach. He started using phrases like quality versus quantity. "Sure there are 85,000 apps in Apple AppStore, how many of them are useful?" Bach asked. "If you do the math on which apps get used," Bach said, "there's a relatively small number apps." Microsoft, he said, focused on delivering 200 useful apps in the Marketplace. "Do you have the right apps? Do you have the apps that people are going to use? Do you have the apps are going to care about. We'll certainly have that."

That sounds almost logical. But another part of me was thinking about the fact that Apple has 85,000 apps and some of them are so much fun, like that virtual lighter and the Ocarina (that thing is amazing). There are other app stores, of course. RIM's app environment is a bit weak, still. Google Android, well, that has, I think, 6,000 apps. That's pretty solid, though I don't really know what any of them are. Palm's Web OS still only has a handful of apps: That's totally not cool.

Bach's right. It's not the number of apps. It's, "Does the store, catalog, marketplace, whatever, have the apps you want and need?" I blame Apple for creating this app obsession. No one counted applications in any space before the AppStore. There used to be thousands of apps across countless categories, but that was for the PC and it was way back in the 80s and early 90sbefore Microsoft pushed competitors out of countless markets. We never counted applications back then. If we had, I could now tell you just how many there really were.

The problem is that obsession feeds on itself. We not only talk about the number of apps in the AppStore, we report and people read about the number of downloads. When Apple reported its one billionth download, I saw some outlets run stories that read as if there were one billion apps to download. I know some people read it that way, because they started to run around saying that there were a billion apps. Someday, there may be that many. So what? There's another school of thought that says this app market growth is unsustainable and, as I mentioned earlier, you know what happened in the PC app market.

Bach noted how difficult it is to find what you need in an application catalog as big as the AppStore (quick, name 25 major applications). That's true, too.

Look, a rich mobile application store is a competitive advantage. It makes every iPhone seem infinitely upgradeable and customizable. It can be whatever you want it to be. Apple's built a whole marketing campaign around the notion: "Yeah, there's an app for that." Microsoft's would more likely be: "This is the app for that." There's a subtle difference there. Microsoft's Bach believes it's provided what you need to start.

Ah, but even Bach can't help but play the numbers game. Ultimately, he did say that Microsoft, too, would have more apps and that they would arrive "in volume." Clearly, that's a promise about numbers.

I guess it's a game none of us can resist playing.