At a conference this week Microsoft announced that its first release of the Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system will not include a clipboard, or cut and paste, function.

Casey McGee, a senior marketing manager in Microsoft's Mobile Communications Business group said, "Windows Phone 7 Series will not initially offer copy-and-paste; instead, we try to solve the most common uses for copy-and-paste via single-tap action."

 "For example, people often want to take an address and view it on a map, highlight a term in the browser, and do a search or copy a phone number to make a call. Instead of the user manually doing a copy and paste in these scenarios, we recognise those situations automatically and make them happen with just one touch. In our early testing, people have been pleased with this approach, but we're always listening to feedback and will continue to improve our feature set over time based on what we hear."

This one-tap approach is not unlike the Data Detectors technology that Apple has been using for some time in their operating system Mac OS X. This technology allows applications to use a service that identifies common text patterns like address or phone numbers. Once detected, all you need to do is click or tap the text and a specialised menu will appear with options, like Show on Map or Add to your Address Book.

The initial iPhone operating system used a similar technology, but it was not enough for a lot of  iPhone users. The latest iPhone operating system (OS 3.0) does include a copy and paste functionality, allowing people to cut and paste information from one application to another, although not within applications.

This announcement comes in the same week as the Wall Street Journal article, which reports that a large number of Microsoft staff use Apple iPhones.

The article claims that up to 10,000 Microsoft employees, or around 10% of the company’s workforce, are using an iPhone instead of a mobile that uses Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating systems. The popularity of the iPhone amongst Microsoft employees is so great that Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer allegedly took one from an employee using it to take a photo at a Microsoft event recently and pretended to stomp on it in front of the gathering.

The Wall Street Journal alleges that Microsoft have since changed their mobile phone reimbursement policy to exclude business phones that do not use the company’s Windows Mobile software.