It's true there's much to be learned from microsoft on commercially successful platforms. They began with BASIC interpreters - a platform - which became a stand

It's true there's much to be learned from microsoft on commercially successful platforms. They began with BASIC interpreters - a platform - which became a standardization across machines, to the extent that manufacturers boasted they were Microsoft BASIC compatible. Then, their insight that DOS was important. The original PC had a choice of three OS's - MSDOS was cheapest. Start at the low end, as the article says. Perhaps one reason they failed where iPhone succeeded was that the iPhone initially wasn't a platform. There was no appstore, you couldn't actually run apps on it, only those built in. The original iPhone was an app, not a platform - and it seems likely that that's what was needed to create that market. Of course, that doesn't excuse MS from not playing catch up as fast as Google did.