I’m still of the opinion that Microsoft could have carved out a share of the mobile phone market by targeting enterprise and by brute-forcing it by throwing a bunch of cash at a few of the really good mobile app developers to create the basic apps that make or break a mobile phone: a podcast app, an ereader, a music player, a video player.

If you want to go wild with it, they could have used their position and created really good integration with Office apps, particularly PowerPoint, so that the mobile app could run a range of functions that turned your phone into a smart control that would run a timer, give time alerts, control the slides, give you video controls, use your phone’s data to stream embedded content, record audio of your presentation etc.

If you had a Windows phone that was capable of the basic functions that are essential for a smartphone and they had the right security options then businesses would probably have gone in on Windows phones. If the phones were portable desktop PCs, even more so. Throw a feature-rich PowerPoint control app in the mix and Microsoft would have cornered the business side of the smartphone market and from there they would have been able to expand their market share, especially with the perk of having a portable desktop via your phone.

I’m not crying over Microsoft missing opportunities though, just pointing out that when you have fuck-you money that you can just throw at a problem and you fumble the bag on the mobile phone market when you’re a tech company then your entire business is a house of cards built upon an effective monopoly.