Microsoft's Mobile Comeback Is Looking Terrible
Microsoft ruled the PC market for decades with utter dominance. But today, as the future shifts toward mobile devices, things are not looking good for Microsoft. It's not that it's not trying: Microsoft is spending a lot of money and effort …
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here runs back to September 2008, when O'Reilly Radar first asked whether Microsoft was missing the boat on mobile — a question the company answered with a '#notdeadyet' rebuttal in October 2010 (pushing back on predictions of consumer demise) and then, by May 2011, with early signs that Windows Phone 7 might be reversing the mobile slide. This April 2012 story marks the turn: the reversal thesis has stalled.
What makes it notable is both the breadth of the pile-on — The Verge, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, asymco and CNET all carried the same assessment on or about April 23, 2012 — and what everyone agrees on: Microsoft's spending and effort are real (a confirmed point), but the market's shift toward mobile devices is outrunning them, threatening the PC-era dominance the corpus treats as settled fact.
First-order effects
- Microsoft's heavy investment in its mobile platform is failing to translate into traction, undoing the fragile recovery narrative that had been building around Windows Phone 7 since mid-2011.
- The company's core asset — decades of near-total PC market dominance — stops functioning as a hedge, because the growth in computing is moving to devices where Microsoft holds little leverage.
Second-order effects
- As mobile share stays flat despite the spend, pressure builds inside Microsoft's ecosystem of handset and carrier partners to justify continued commitment to the platform against alternatives with proven demand.
- Developer and partner attention increasingly prices Microsoft as a single-platform bet rather than a default, forcing the company to buy relevance with money rather than inherit it with install base.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the structural risk is that platform control shifts from the desktop incumbent to whatever mobile ecosystem captures developers first, reducing Microsoft's consumer franchise to a follower position it has never operated from.
- A failed comeback would push Microsoft's center of gravity further toward enterprise and software licensing — a strategic retreat that reshapes how the industry reads every subsequent mobile announcement from Redmond.
The trend: The PC-era platform incumbents are discovering that mobile shifts power to whoever controls the device ecosystem, making expensive comebacks necessary but not sufficient.