This article neglects to mention the primary factor in MS's failure to gain traction in the mobile space and that is it wanted to replicate its hugely profitabl

This article neglects to mention the primary factor in MS's failure to gain traction in the mobile space and that is it wanted to replicate its hugely profitable business model from the desktop. Is they would make the mobile OS and license it to the hardware makers. The problem was that hardware makers, familiar with how MS treated them with Windows wanted nothing to do with licencing anything again from MS, and so they didn't. MS at that point had the choice of going it alone with their own hardware or effectively dropping out of the market. Since they had almost no hardware expertise at the time and, I suspect, felt the market was too small to be worth the effort, they demured. Even today when MS has new software that requires non PC hardware they have to do the hardware themselves.