My suspicious is that Gates was all for a phones strategy, and they were doing pretty well up to Windows Mobile 5. Had 50% of the "not-all-that-great-but-useable" smartphone market, along with Symbian.
But Ballmer was less enthusiastic. And then the whole Longhorn/Vista brouhaha hit. And I think all available management brain power was diverted into trying to sort that out. As they had to slowly remove all the interesting bits of Longhorn from Vista and desperately try to get the hardware vendors to write drivers, plus writing a big slew of their own, to keep the compatibility mess down to merely bloody annoying - rather than disastrous.
So I think they dropped the ball on mobile. And never seem to have done anything more than the bare minimum since. Which is a shame, because Win Mob 5 was OK for its time and hardware, and Win Pho 7, 8 and 10 could have been excellent with a bit more polish. And with a few less 2 year-long delays to get their shit together.
I'm often rude about Google. But their management have chose a few strategic areas and been willing to bet several billion over several years, with no guarantee of success, in order to achieve their goals. They've then swallowed the continuing losses until they got what they were after.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
