Balmer missed the boat on all of this because he was out of touch. Android and Iphone indeed happened around the 2006-2008 time frame after having been rumored since about 2003-2006. They both were the logical conclusion from OSS and Linux emerging in the late nineties as a viable platform for development on embedded hardware. The difference between Balmer and Jobs is what they did in the nineties. Jobs ran a startup that produced the software that he later brought back to Apple that indeed also became the basis for the iphone. That's a decade plus of vision, R&D, etc. coming together. Balmer's vision meanwhile was Windows everywhere throughout this. When Jobs went on stage with the iphone, Balmer had nothing meaningful whatsoever to show. The little MS had was quickly forgotten. Once the iphone launched, Windows CE was dead as a door nail.

Windows Phone was a nice effort but years late and bogged down in a continued windows everywhere strategy and aggravated by lousy execution combined with institutional arrogance. They initially launched it as a windows CE shell with severe limitations. Then they alienated their OEMs and users with a highly disruptive and backwards incompatible move to windows NT. Finally, they topped it up with the Nokia acquisition. Nokia had committed early to windows phone which because of the prolonged uncertainty around this platform proved to be a major disaster. I used to work at Nokia, I've seen them fuck this up close. It wasn't pretty and Balmer was right at the center of it. MS ultimately acquired it and then proved it did not know how to fix it either. I still believe they could have pulled it off but not with the leadership (or lack thereof) that they had.

Balmer missed the boat utterly and completely, misread the market signals, and came up empty handed. The doomed Nokia acquisition was the proverbial nail in his coffin: the last in a decade long series of expensive failures.

The Google thing a few years ago was an existential threat to MS. Google was pushing users to chrome books running google office in a chrome browser on cheap hardware that ran Linux. The existential threat was two fold: no windows and no office. Nadella turned that around by making office 365 something that runs well everywhere, including on Chrome OS. The recent reverse takeover of Chromium by making that the centerpiece of Edge, sort of solidifies this. Up until then MS strategy was charging loads of money for windows on expensive laptops. Small form factor laptops became a thing during the mid 2000s and one key problem with those was that the windows license was substantial cost factor. It sort of made putting linux on hardware like that inevitable. It's the same problem they had on mobile. Expensive windows licenses for cheap phones did not make sense. That's why Android happened.

WSL indeed only matters to techies. But if techies pull their nose up for your platform, you have a long term problem because techies are the people that produce the things that make your platform long term viable. Five years ago, no self respecting engineer deploying on Linux would bother much with a windows machine. It was just too painful. Nothing worked and a typical README for developer tools on e.g. Github would be heavily mac/linux centric. Things like node.js, git, etc. barely even worked on it or only with a lot of workarounds and kludges. It was a big reason for Azure flopping in the market because MS sold windows in the cloud when the market was moving away from Windows. Nadella turned that around by embracing OSS, linux, and turning Balmer's mantra of "developers, developers, developers" into something that actually meant something to developers again. VS Studio Code and typescript now dominating the node.js and javascript ecosystem is quite a contrast with half a decade ago.