Pop quiz: You're walking down the street and see someone using an iPhone. What is your first reaction?

A) Draw your own Steve Jobs wonder-device in order to show that you have cooler games, and thus make the other user suffer from a crippling case of App Envy.

B) Think nothing of it.

C) Holler at the top of your lungs, whip the iPhone out of his or her hands, and smash it into a thousand expensive pieces under your boot heel.

If you're Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, evidently, the answer is something close to C. At an employee gathering in Seattle on Sept. 10, Ballmer spied an employee trying to take a photo of him with an iPhone. After snatching away the offending device, he apparently mimed stomping it into so many broken circuits.

Actually, I'm sort of surprised he didn't go all the way. Many things Steve Ballmer may be, but a man of half-measures is definitely not one of them.

It may have been a fake stomp, but Microsoft still seems determined to penetrate the consumer side of the mobile market in a very real way, even though most surveys show Microsoft's share of the mobile operating system market to be small and falling.

And despite Ballmer's previous assertions that Microsoft is interested in spreading its products to the largest possible customer base, in contrast to competitors such as Apple that aim more for specific demographics, Microsoft's latest promotional move in the consumer-mobile segment is decidedly boutique: enlisting top fashion designers to create five themes for Windows-equipped phones.

Those designers are Diane von Furstenberg, Vera Wang, Isaac Mizrahi, Rock & Republic and Ron Arad. It's like the answer to the Jeopardy question, "What names do you not associate with the Microsoft brand?"

But Redmond seemingly wants to change that, at least when it comes to the mobile marketplace.

"We feel these designer themes are great examples of how Windows phones are moving into the consumer space," Liz Sloan, a marketing manager for Microsoft, wrote in a Sept. 14 Windows Mobile blog posting, "and our Windows phone offerings on Oct. 6 will continue this expansion of the brand.

"Smartphones are just as much a fashion statement as the clothes you wear and are quickly becoming a must-have accessory," Sloan added. "The designer themes are just one more way that Windows phones help folks customize their device to fit their style."

With regard to another kind of designer -- that'd be the ones who deal with code instead of cloth -- Microsoft seems to be taking a similar approach.

"We would definitely want to promote that you make more money selling applications than selling your application in a dollar store," Loke Uei, senior technical product manager for Microsoft's Mobile Developer Experience Team, told mobile application developers during a Redmond gathering on Aug. 19. "Come on, I think your app is worth more than that."

As with so many things these days, it seems that Microsoft is pursuing something of a bifurcated strategy: to make its products appeal to the widest audience possible -- as evidenced by the deals that Microsoft has signed with various manufacturers to port the upcoming Windows Mobile 6.5 onto their phones -- but also provide an "exclusive" option for those who get really, really excited at the prospect of downloading a $30 app onto their Ron Arad-themed phones.

Microsoft probably figures that it's large enough to appeal to a variety of demographic segments without muddying its brand. But as rivals such as Apple and Google have shown, sometimes the best way to build buzz around a product ecosystem is to define it in a singular and simple-to-express way ("Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," "I'm a Mac"). Whether Microsoft can appeal to both the higher-end and most-common-denominator levels of the mobile market -- to have its cake and eat it, too -- is a question that won't be answered for some time; certainly not until the release in late 2010 of Windows Mobile 7, which will supposedly take the iPhone and the Palm Pre head-on.

There's one thing I do know, though: Put an iPhone in front of Ballmer, and it'll be like a red flag in front of a bull.