They did invest in mobile from fairly early. Microsoft was selling smart phones (through third party manufacturers) in the early 2000s. They just executed very poorly on mobile by building the wrong thing for the wrong customers. By the time leadership figured this out and started to pour money into Windows Phone, they were too late to catch up.
App stores and app platforms became critical to the success on any mobile platform. Microsoft didn’t sufficiently cultivate the Windows CE based apps enough. Then they ditched that app platform for a new one in Windows Phone 7, losing what little they had. Companies that had built apps for iPhone and Android had no incentive doing so on Windows at that point.
Ballmer at least recognized the value of Azure, Office in the cloud and similar efforts. All the seeds of Satya’s success were planted during Ballmer’s reign. There was just so much fumbling.
I remember this basically as around the time that Microsoft bought Nokia and produced some really nice looking phones that people were excited about... they had also just reinvented their app platform and nothing could run on them.
In the interim, Microsoft built quite a few phones mostly with Samsung, HTC, and Huawei, but also oddball partners like Dell.
Like it has always broadly felt like they were very late to the party on comprehending where software was headed (caught up pretty well with O365, but that seems like leveraging then entrenched nature of Office successfully).
https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-...
Pichai may not have capitalized effectively on the impressive AI investments Google has made, but he has steered innovation in newer directions like AI and cloud. Technical victories, but questionable business decisions.
I think one possible moral here is, sometimes the best opportunity is the one you don't take.