There is also opportunity cost though. Maybe if they succeeded in mobile then they would have missed Teams. Its hard to say that the side effects from missing that wave were exclusively negative.
Quite the opposite. If they have owned mobile + desktop, they could have a much stronger integration, and we wouldn't be Google first with our apps.
Yeah that's a good point with regards to integration. I still think the Microsoft that wins in mobile looks very different from the Microsoft we know today.
Arguably Microsoft is actually well-placed to continually miss major advancements in areas they should be king in (or adjacent to them) and yet continue.
Using Teams as a not negative example is very odd.
They have crushed Slack with Teams and it is the backbone of their enterprise offering. Am I missing something?
I am referring to the near universal opinion that Teams is shit software that is only worth forcing employees to use because it is free.
And this is Google's core business. Nothing came along yet that replaced corporate use of microsoft office, and that is were they make most of their money.