No, Bill. No (Premium)

It's hard watching Microsoft’s former CEOs prostrate themselves and apologize for their previous misdeeds. Especially when they get it wrong.

It happened before with Steve Ballmer, who apologized in recent years---incorrectly---for being “wrong” about the iPhone when it was first released. Ballmer wasn’t wrong. His assertions about the iPhone---that it was too expensive and did not appeal to business customers---were so on the nose that Apple dropped the price of the flailing device by an incredible $200 just two months after it launched and then trumpeted its successor’s support of Exchange/EAS and other enterprise features a year later.

Ballmer also apologized for not following up Windows with a “second act” that he says could have been turning Microsoft into a “world-class hardware company.” Again, he was wrong to do so. Software wasn’t just Microsoft’s core area of expertise---its only truly successful hardware product at the time was a mouse---but more to the point, Microsoft’s real success was in partnering with others, including and perhaps especially hardware makers.

What Ballmer was really responding to in both of these public displays of wrong-headed self-inspection was what had happened in the wake of Microsoft’s back-to-back antitrust defeats. It’s a period of time that many now call Microsoft’s “lost decade.” When rivals like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook were able to rise unimpeded by a software colossus that had never before been defeated in any material way. These firms could never have succeeded to the level they did had they faced an unfettered, uninhibited Microsoft.

And now Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and first CEO, is doing it too.

In a recent interview, Gates was asked about his biggest mistake. And he replied, essentially, that Windows Phone was his biggest mistake, that he/Microsoft should have established its mobile platform as the dominant challenger to the iPhone, and not Google with Android.

“Platforms … are winner-take-all markets," he said. “So, the greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is. That is, Android is the standard phone platform, non-Apple phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win. And it really is winner take all. If you’re there with half as many apps, or 90 percent as many apps, you’re on your way to complete doom. There's room for exactly one non-Apple operating system.”

Ah boy.

Just to get this out of the way, Microsoft’s defeat in mobile had almost nothing to do with Windows Phone. Those seeds were sown many years earlier.

As denoted by its original name, Windows Phone 7, that product was just an evolution of (more than) several revisions to a mobile platform that had its root in Windows CE in the mid-1990s. Windows CE originally targeted miniature PC-like devices called Handheld PCs, or HPCs. But it was adapted to power a series of PDAs---Palm-sized PCs, Pocket PC, and...