Imagine a world where Ballmer wasn't blinded by the desktop and enterprise market during the 2000s, and Windows Phone actually became a thing, and we had true competition among flagship phones today. Imagine a Surface Pro phone with modern specs that could sideload any x86 application. One can dream.

Microsoft could still make an Android fork the same way they rebased Edge on chromium. Since android is mediocre on many aspects (e.g. no modern and performant Java support) they could differentiate and create a market opportunity. Their name is big enough to create a store. They already have a linux distro BTW https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner

I think this is what never made sense to me about the failure of Windows Phone. They have a store. They have an operating system. They have an unbelievably extensive list of hardware partners with decades of manufacturing experience. They have some of the best engineers in the world. And yet, they ceded the single largest consumer industry to Google and Apple. The only explanation is poor leadership.