I think Microsoft has always been a software company, and never really intended to get into any other business. At the same time, Apple grew from being a strict

I think Microsoft has always been a software company, and never really intended to get into any other business. At the same time, Apple grew from being a strictly hardware company into a "platform" company. That is, they began developing the software that ran on their hardware. This put them in a much better position to begin developing devices that were not traditional computers. Microsoft, on the other hand, has done all they can to avoid making hardware. It shows with the Surface...while it's a nice piece of hardware there are many failures with the device that perhaps a company with more experience building those kinds of things would have caught early on in development. Only recently have they began working in hardware, and developing full products. I don't believe they would have even had this capability had it not been for the extraordinary work that Microsoft Research does. But Microsoft has made a ton of money by pushing both their consumer software and their tools/infrastructure for companies to develop their own software on the .NET platform. It's widely known that Microsoft's developer support channels (if you want to pay for them) are much more developed than Apple's, whose dev environments are geared for far simpler setups. .NET shops, for example, pretty much do not need to worry about the latest and greatest tools. Microsoft can provide everything you need to get work done on their platform. But personally, I don't think you could possibly develop as good of a business relationship between hardware manufacturer and software developer as a company which includes both facets of product development. These days, the real money is in getting people to buy your gadget, as Apple has shown. Microsoft missed out on that, because they did not invest properly in building hardware when they could have. And that's where Microsoft went "wrong". Though they may not have...