True - they seem determined to plug away at mobile until they make a success of it, and fair play to them: Windows 10 Mobile is decent. They've obviously got an uphill battle ahead of them to win back developers and customers but I think they can do it eventually.

I'd still like to see a credible OSS alternative in the mix as well, and I wonder if Mozilla couldn't make that work if they dropped their low-end focus.

Ubuntu's Snappy-Core grew out of their brief run at the phone: http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/devices

It has some parallels with Microsoft's strategy and could roll back into phones as just another device. And I think that getting a platform that works from embedded to server clusters has a good chance of how provisioning phones works ten years from now.

There's really nothing magical about phones. It's some compute cores, a bit of memory, some radios, a battery and a display. The only distinguishing feature of a phone is how the radio is tuned.