End of the day, the Microsoft ecosystem just dominated client tech utterly. The previous king of mobile, Blackberry, was basically a hardware version of Microsoft Outlook.

They had tablets and phones years ago, but chose to position them as shitty PCs instead of real devices. Internet Explorer for Windows CE was a steaming pile of shit that has it been something better would have changed many things.

Today Microsoft is in trouble and is running on inertia. In many ways Apple owns higher ed. Google completely dominates K-12. The Windows 10 strategy is designed to make IT people in enterprises fail.

All of that was triggered by the iPhone.