Well, that's a very myopic view of what happened to windows mobile. Windows mobile and blackberry owned the mobile enterprise market for years. Then the iPhone came around and despite not having any ecosystem at all (or even native app capability) immediately started displacing both of them rapidly. Microsoft and RIM both gambled for a long time that ecosystem would keep windows mobile and BB OS in place, and only realized that it wouldn't once iPhone and Android had taken most of their market away. Microsoft then concluded from this that ecosystem didn't matter as much as people thought it did, and that if their offering was good enough the ecosystem would materialize by itself. Windows phone was never good enough compared to iOS and Android for that to happen, so it failed. But, the underlying theory was not crazy given what had just happened in the enterprise mobile market.