You never know what will happen when Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) gets on the stage, but if everything stays according to plan, Robbie Bach will get up today at CTIA and unveil Windows Mobile 6.1, a minor upgrade to its mobile operating system.  Microsoft walked me through the changes in Redmond last week (the announcement posted today), and while some of them will make Windows Mobile users happy, none of them are enough to get people to rush out to buy a new phone. With few new tricks up the company’s sleeve, it makes you wonder if Microsoft has stopped innovating in wireless at a time when competition is most fierce.

When Microsoft first entered the business, it wisely targeted the early adopters—business users. However, in the past year, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) quickly became competitive with Microsoft by fulfilling a consumer demand that it was obviously neglecting. In Apple’s first full year of selling the iPhone, it expects to sell 10 million devices. Last year, Microsoft sold about the same number of licenses (11 million), even though it has much broader distribution crossing several manufacturers, carriers and countries. This year, Microsoft expects to sell more than 20 million licenses, and of course that doesn’t count the many users it already has in the market. After discussing the disconnect with several former Windows Mobile executives, they pointed to a few roadblocks that stand in the way. They said the product fails to stand out because Microsoft is trying to be all things to all consumers, and to make matters worse, Microsoft has the gargantuan task of building a product that spans several product and services groups. A few examples after the jump:

-- To come up with the latest updates in 6.1, Microsoft combed the globe, sending a team of ethnographers (scientists who study behavior) to determine what consumers most wanted as a whole, rather than picking a subsegment to focus on. As an example, an ethnographer who went to China, witnessed someone using the phone’s clock to time boiling an egg. The observation and others led the team to believe all people wanted to see the clock within one second, said Scott Rockfeld, Microsoft’s group marketing manager for Windows Mobile. Because of that, the clock’s font is much larger.

-- Here’s a case of another taking Windows Mobile and running with it: Velocity Mobile, based in Seattle and London, this morning is launching a consumer-friendly phone using the Windows Mobile platform. Velocity’s President David Hayes said Velocity isn’t for enterprises or “techie guys,” the phones are for a broad audience. “We looked at a design that is sleek sexy and far more consumer-focused, and at a price point that’s far more in line with what a consumer, not an enterprise is willing to pay.” Why can’t Microsoft do that with its own platform? Hayes said: “We sit around, and every day, we are in disbelief, and we say, why isn’t Microsoft doing that?” Hayes is familiar with the Windows Mobile platform after working at i-Mate, a Dubai-based handset maker that also uses Windows Mobile. He became i-mate’s CTO after it bought his digital picture frame company, A Living Picture. He said Velocity doesn’t have the constraints Microsoft has to deal with: “If you work in a company of that size, you have teams working on products and services, you have teams for [Windows] Live, ActiveSync, and getting all of those people to work together—from hardware to software – is hard and it doesn’t work.”

-- Another recent example is Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC), which said in February it will use the Windows Mobile platform on the high-end Xperia phone. The news is a huge vote of confidence for the OS, especially since Sony values style. However, Sony isn’t using the Windows Mobile OS out of the box. The XPERIA X1 will have a layer on top of the OS, which Sony calls Xperia panels. The panels look a bit like the iPhone, and the widgets on the home screen let the user touch once for things such as the web, multimedia features and other applications. T-Mobile USA recently did a similar thing when it created an original user interface on the Shadow phone, which was much more consumer friendly.

Microsoft has a lot to juggle. It has a legacy in Windows Mobile that it must uphold, and can’t easily switch over to a new platform that might sacrifice the business users that have come to rely on the company. Still, Microsoft is making changes. It just licensed Adobe’s Flash Lite, and is working on a competing Silverlight technology. It restructured the division, bringing in new executives at the top, and two months ago, it purchased Danger, the maker of the consumer-friendly Sidekick.  So, will Microsoft do something exciting soon? Rockfeld ruled out the likelihood of a Microsoft-made phone. “At this point, we have no plans to make a phone on our own,” he said, but expressed his high hopes for the sector by quoting an IDC figure that the smartphone market will grow from 10 percent of the phones today to 30 percent in 2011. And, Windows Mobile 7 is rumored to have increased flexibility for companies such as Velocity and Sony Ericsson that want to make a UI their own. So perhaps, they’ll surprise us. Maybe not today, but we’ll keep waiting.