> Sounds about right to me. They missed the entire smartphone revolution because they were too slow to adapt their OS (literally their main product) to run on mobile devices.

Remember the whole antitrust thing? Microsoft was under a consent decree that expired between 2007-2009 (different provisions expired at different times).

That decree, combined with the material threat of additional action during that time window, limited their ability to compete (because that's, well, the entire point of a consent decree motivated by an antitrust settlement).

There's a reason that you see a notable difference in Microsoft's market position and strategy from 2012-present compared to the previous decade (2001-2012). The timing of the Ballmer-to-Nadella transition is not coincidental; it's indicative of the larger shift the company made as they repositioned themselves to aggressively expand again.