Yep. Microsoft sold the Xbox at a loss and didn't turn a profit from it until 2008 - 6 years after it first edged its way into the market.

By that metric, it's way too soon to call Microsoft's mobile execution a failure.

Their first smart phone was windows mobile 2003. They been at it 9 years, 1 reboot and 2% market share. (longer if you count their pda days).

it's pretty much a failure.

They executed well on the XBox and didn't need to reboot.

They misstepped with WinMo. Then they rebooted. Start your count over again.

No, they didn't. Over the course of its life, the XBox brand is still billions in the red. It only started turning up a relatively small profit a year or two ago. It has a long way to go before anyone should consider it successful.

The problem with consoles is that there's no brand loyalty (except for Nintendo). It only takes 1 bad console for an established player to vanish, and 1 good console for a newcomer to succeed.

Xbox live might be changing that, but it's still waayyy too early to call it either a success or failure. Though, certainly financially, it's been a small disaster so far.

Welcome to consumer electronics. Comparatively speaking, Microsoft has fared quite well.

Comparatively speaking, Apple has done much better in consumer electronics.

Sure. Apple has done spectacularly well. It's a big jump from "not as good as Apple" to "worst CEO in America".

I won't make any judgement on leadership, and want to just point out this fact. A peer of Microsoft is succeeding very well in consumer electronics, meaning Microsoft could potentially as well and would become insanely successful (big profits beyond enterprise). Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft and so would love for them to realize that potential. I'm sure it is much more complicated than "replace CEO" to get there.

Everyone on this thread has to realize that they're effectively rebooting with Windows Phone 8 later this year again.[1] Maybe not to the degree of WinMo -> WP7, but it's certainly another disruptive (to the app devs) refresh.

[1]http://www.winsupersite.com/article/networking/time-running-...

As far as I know, they have yet to disclose the full developer story around WP8. We can certainly speculate, but I doubt they'll do anything too disruptive or they'll risk losing the small amount of market they've worked so hard to gain.

If you consider the Windows Phone line to be merely the next iteration of Windows Mobile, then, yes, thus far it has been a complete failure.

But I don't think that's a very holistic viewpoint. Despite how terrible Windows Mobile was, it had a good hold of the market until the iPhone came along. It wasn't really a "failure" until it started declining in 2008. Microsoft's response, Windows Phone 7, was a complete reboot of their mobile line, and we have yet to see how it will perform in the long run.

Everyone is referring to WP7, since they effectively 're-entered'.

we are talking about Balmer and his reign, which includes then entire winmo era.

What I expected was for Microsoft to react as quickly to the iPhone as they did to Netscape. They didn't. Google did that however, and today Android has a chance at getting the 80% market share that Ballmer talked about when he laughed about the iPhone and said that he was pretty happy with their efforts in the mobile industry (Windows Mobile).

Not seeing what they were up against with the iPhone was not "executing correcly", it was incompetence. The same kind of incompetence that is killing Nokia today.

In order to dominate the mobile space now, Microsoft has to not just make something comparable to iOS and Android, they have to out-innovate them.

> It is losing money, sure, but short term losses are not important when you're talking about entering a market as large as the mobile phone market after the existing players are firmly entrenched.

I think the point on mobile is that Microsoft itself was a well-entrenched player in mobile, and they laughed[1] while allowing that position to get completely eroded by less experienced competitors.

It's true that after that happened, they've seemed to build a pretty good project in Windows Phone 7. But I don't think it's really accurate to start the scorekeeping so recently.

[1]:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

edit: formatting

On business, The only score worth keeping is present/future. Past isn't really relevant, except for how it is prologue.

Correctly? Hardly. They've executed competently on some aspects. But if they hope to be a serious competitor they have to do better.

They've managed to avoid electrocuting any of their users. Other than that, if they've done anything "competently" in the mobile space, I haven't seen it.

They competently extracted patent license revenuen

This seems like a funny definition of "executing" that has nothing to do with a successful outcome.