They already had the most widely adopted platform in Win32. The transition to .NET was horrible. No one was sure what .NET actually meant for a while, as it was used in marketing for all kinds of things. They also seemed to change their minds every few months about how which platform people should use. Finally it converged, and .NET is not bad. But they already owned the desktop app OS and dev platform since the mid 90s, when they overtook Borland and others.
All I know is that for a sample of 1, me, I used to use (and really like) the Borland (Pascal, C, ...) compilers in the late 80s and early 90s. Then, I started doing more unix and then Linux work. GCC, perl and later Java was there. By the time Delphi was there, it was too late - Java had already provided a free equivalent. (Java is just Modula + OOP + UCSD-P-code in C++ clothing)
More than iOS and Android SDKs?
There are 1.5 billion PCs world wide.
Are all of them running .NET?
Gee, when have we heard this before. Oh, yes: when the iPhone was released.
This is why these "mobility" servers like IBM WorkLight or SAP/Sybase Unwired are hot products.
Blackberry's are going away, we have remote email via iOS, and its only a matter of time before other people get the gear sales has.
I think the big difference is, Cook doesn't seem to be pushing innovative people out. The only big head to roll under Cook's watch was Scott Forstall's, and apparently he left because he clashed with Jonny Ive (and wanted to go to war with Google in the machine learning space - not just having a few in-house alternatives, but trying to lock Google out of the iPhone to promote Apple's stuff).
Has a lot of failures on his plate for one man? Please hand this comment an award for middlebrow remark of the year.
Let's put Steve Ballmer's accomplishments in perspective: Have you tripled a multi-billion dollar company's revenue over ten years? Did you launch the Xbox? Did you launch Windows Phone (10% marketshare in 3 years)? Did you launch Bing (growing faster than the search market)? Did you grow .NET into the most widely adopted application development platform in the world? Did you grow the Windows Server business out of nothing compared to where it was 15 years ago? Did you turn Visual Studio into the gold standard for IDEs?
Didn't think so. Ballmer will be remembered for one great mistake, and that's denying Microsoft's culture and employees a strong technical visionary over the course of his tenure.
Ballmer is a COO, kind of like the guy running Apple these days - neither Ballmer nor Tim Cook have a strong ability to anticipate changes in the way technology is consumed compared to their predecessors. And this is largely what's responsible for Microsoft's big whiffs - they missed the mark multiple times on the consumerization of technology.
People are already starting to grumble many of the same criticisms of Tim Cook's innovation that they did about Steve Ballmer, and who can blame them? Over the past three years all Apple has shipped are the same products they had before but with different screen sizes.
However, that doesn't mean that Tim Cook won't be successful in growing Apple's business, nor does it mean that Steve Ballmer was a failure.
As an ex-Microsoftie, I could not be happier to see Steve go. The company needs a technical visionary in order to stop having to play from behind every time there's a change in the market.
But to call Steve a failure is utter nonsense and requires overlooking all of the successes that he and Microsoft had during his tenure.