Please allow me to correct myself - Most people wouldn't have taken the bet nor have the insight to do so. Steve Ballmer or maybe Steve Sinofsky or someone did. And they are not most people.
It's a billion dollar strategy. Not easy to make.
First WP 7 doesn't get upgraded to WP 8. Then you get a third OS for tablets. Then all they can come up with as a value proposition over iOS/Googdroid/AmazonDroid is Excel and a keyboard that makes a satisfying click.
MS certainly wasn't in the best position but they have many thigns they could take advantage of: huge cash stream, relationships with developers, relationships with OEMs, relationships in retail, relationships with corporate buyers, X-box live, Skype, Bing, etc. Despite all that they've managed to have little in the way of apps, installed base, mindshare, etc to show for the last 5 years in mobile. If this was all part of their master plan they need to be taken out back and shot in the dead of night.
Well, since it was lost, it was quite easy.
And it's not their first billion dollar down the drain strategy.
Microsoft has been chasing Apple since they released the Zune with some vague hope of success. The sad thing is there are a number of exceedingly talented individuals working at the company, it just sounds like innovation was strangled by corporate culture years ago (if it ever existed there).
They've been copying "things that work" for so long, and up until a few years ago, it just worked. And now that it doesn't, it seems that they have no idea what to do.
In that regard I think that the XBox team is probably the only well-ran unit in the firm.
The first XBox was basically a PC with an exact spec. The 360 was plagued by RRODs. I know 5 people who own XBox 360, and every single one of them was either on the 2nd or 3rd console due to malfunction.
The Kinect was not developed at Microsoft - the camera and original skeletal modeling is from PrimeSense (although later MS took over the software part, at least). It was a marketing response to the Wii, true - but it's a third party product they bought.
"Only limited to academic level research"? I had a chance to play with the commercial ZCam almost two years before the Kinect came out; And ZCam wasn't the first product.
> In that regard I think that the XBox team is probably the only well-ran unit in the firm.
Have they turned a profit yet? I suppose they have by now, but they went through at least 4BN in funding before they did (if they have indeed). It might be well-run, but without real evidence I can't assume that.