@darkkite @maegul From the outside, it also seems like there was some corporate politics involved.

Apple was making its comeback thanks to Mac OSX, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.

Samsung was toying with its own OS (Tizen), apps, and online services (Bixby).

Google responded by toying with hardware itself, including Glass, Nest, and at one point even buying Motorola.

So it looked like all the big tech companies were going to try to copy Apple by trying to own the full tech stack.

The then-CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, responded by trying to reposition his firm as a “devices and services” company. So he ended up with the XBox, Zune, Kinect, Kin, and Surface.

Then he went all-in with a takeover of Nokia.

Soon afterwards, Ballmer stood aside, and Satya Nadella took over.

Satya wanted to reposition Microsoft as a cloud-first company, competing against Google and AWS rather than Apple.

He kept the XBox and Surface, let the rest bleed money for a couple of quarters, wrote off their value as a loss, and then killed it off.