It turns out that Vodafone in Portugal, which announced that it was building an IPTV system in July, is not following its German counterpart, but has instead invested in Microsoft Mediaroom middleware, which means that it owes almost nothing to the system installed at Arcor in Germany. We should have known, because Vodafone around Europe operates almost as if it were five or six separate companies and rarely reaches a consensus on how to go about anything except its core cellular technology. The detail came up in a discussion with Mediaroom this week, when the Microsoft IPTV arm pointed out that it had a larger share of the top ten European incumbent IPTV installations than we had credited it with…