Thanks to the leadership of then-CEO Steve Ballmer, Microsoft failed to recognize the potential that smartphones had when Apple first introduced the iPhone, and by the time the company realized its mistake, Apple and Google had already come to dominate the mobile market. When Microsoft introduced Windows Phone back in 2010, is was already too late, and the decisions that the company made in the following years certainly didn’t help.
Microsoft did want to break the duopoly of Apple-Google in the smartphone market. It did put a lot of resources into the problem. However, it was an uneven competition. Microsoft on one end was trying to take on Apple on its #1 product. Apple put most of its energy on iPhone, while phone was just among the 40 things Microsoft did. For a long time, phone division didn’t even come into the top 5 priorities for Microsoft [with a lion’s share of attention going to Windows, Office, Online Services and Servers – for obvious reasons]. This was not wrong, but that is the reality. On the other end, Microsoft was trying to compete with Android – with the power of Google, Samsung and the whole open source community behind it. Even if Google were selling Android as a proprietary software without other partners, Microsoft would have found it very hard as Google had its powerful range of services [search, maps, mail] to back it up while Microsoft’s comparative services significantly lag those of Google’s.
