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.