(I think) it's not hard to understand where microsoft went wrong. Ballmer just doesn't seem to get where the industry is going. As evidence, this quote from the article:<p><pre><code> Indeed, Ballmer seemed to have no intention of leaving when he announced a
massive reorganization of the entire company in July 2013. Behind the scenes
he had also begun negotiating an acquisition that was meant to transform
Microsoft. He had become convinced that the company had to make hardware
too. The reason why goes back to his chart. The two companies which have
seen the greatest increases in the share of profits they take are Apple and
Samsung, particularly Apple, whose share of the technology industry’s
profits leapt from 7 percent in 2008 to 21 percent in 2013. To Ballmer, the
message was clear, and so, in December 2012, he began talking to the Finnish
smartphone-maker, Nokia, whose C.E.O., Stephen Elop, had worked at
Microsoft. There was a defensive reason for the deal as well as an offensive
one. Nokia was pretty much the only company left that was making Windows
phones. If Nokia went under, what would happen to Microsoft’s phone business?
</code></pre>
Apple and Samsung's phone businesses are entirely different. Apple is selling ios to the high and middle end market. Samsung is getting devoured from the bottom, because there is very little difference between android oems, whereas Apple doesn't need (or want!) the bottom. It's pretty amazing that someone like Ballmer wouldn't see that coming, given that Xiaomi and the other chinese competitors are running a classic competitive playbook on Samsung.<p>Stratechery has written about this at length, though I don't recall if it was clearly discussed in a single article or my mental synthesis from a collection. Either way, differentiated companies -- apple -- require completely different strategies than nondifferentiated -- samsung.