Alternatively its interesting to imagine if instead of buying Nokia, Ballmer had instead doubled down more fully on cloud and bought servers to subsidize the transition to the cloud in order to compete with Amazon AWS. Azure wouldn't be playing catch up now.

It'd be challenging to try to sell handset manufacturers a WinMo license to compete with Apple (who makes money from HW and only more recently apps/subscription services) when Google was giving Android away for free to the same handset manufacturers. Even historically low margin Amazon gave up on the Fire phone.

Additionally smartphones are a very visible consumer facing product and thus very visible from an anti-trust populism perspective. [1] Imagine Steve Ballmer testifying in congress like Zuckerberg, Cook, Dorsey, etc. - he would totally have bungled it.

That said for consumers (rather than MSFT shareholders) a triopoly is for sure better than a duopoly.

[1] Bill Gates thinks Windows Mobile would have beaten Android without Microsoft’s antitrust woes https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20952370/bill-gates-windo...