Microsoft has been buying a lot of ad space on PhoneNews.com for Live Search for Mobile. And, I’m more than happy to take their money. But, I do have to ask… why not just roll Live Search into the platform?

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense why the Live Search application was not integrated into Windows Mobile 6.1. Sure, lots of top-tier carriers are doing it at the request of Microsoft, but if Microsoft wants to make it ubiquitous, why not just make it a mandatory component for the system.

Yes, the Voice Recognition feature is still in beta. Fine. Ship a version with devices that doesn’t have voice search enabled. When it goes final, it will be updated automatically, or else a user can go online and opt-in if they want to.

Live Search’s lack of inclusion is just one more indication of the lack of strategy that Windows Mobile 6 continues to suffer from. We haven’t seen a single Windows Update push, and we’re already on 6.1. It’s almost as un-functional as the hidden Update control panel that dates back to late versions of Pocket PC 2002.

I’d like to see Microsoft get their act together for Windows Mobile 7. And, I think they may just do that. But as it stands right now, you have to download several apps from Microsoft just to get a Windows Mobile device up to speed… and that’s now how things should be. Windows Live should just be there. After all, that was supposed to be a cornerstone of the upgrade from Windows Mobile 5.0 to 6.0.