After a decade at MS I have come to believe that there is such a thing as a first mover disadvantage. Being too early to market is just as bad as being late. Basically a new venture at a high tech company gets a lot of enthusiasm and funding, but it if doesn't succeed within some time frame, not only does it get abandoned, but the company in general won't try again for quite some time. Something else that can happen is the early v1 product gets a bad reputation, making it hard for a better v2 to gain traction.

This actually hurt Windows Phone sales. Windows Mobile 5/6 (and Pocket PC before) were miserable consumer products[1]. Sales agents in cellphone stores learned not to sell phones from Microsoft, because their device sales bonus would get clawed back when the device was returned. (Manufacturers give $$ to sales staff for each phone sold from that manufacturer, or at least that is how the market worked back when I was last in it, info is circa 2010!

When Windows Phone came out, 2 bad things happened.

1. Sales staff wasn't being offered bonuses for selling Windows Phones
2. When everyone realized how big of a disaster that move was, bonuses started being offered, but staff had been burned by 7-8 years of horrible return rates on prior Microsoft smart phones, everyone knew iPhones didn't get returned, so sales staff pushed iPhones.

oops!

Microsoft Sync is another one. Microsoft tried to make Android Auto back in 2007! Holy shit. Just think about that. In 2007 MP3 playback was still an extra add on in many models. AUX ports were an add on! No one had smart phones! It was crazy ahead of its time. And cars just weren't designed to be "smart" yet. Heck I am pretty sure in 2007 you could still find a few cars that didn't have power windows.

Oh I also used something that looked a lot like docker containers back at Microsoft. It was chained and nested VHD partitions that you could update the OS and Apps separately by just dropping in and relinking the VHDs, so the apps and dependencies were one self contained virtual hard drive image, to upgrade the apps just run some magic commands and the existing OS image had a new app image attached to it.

Microsoft had a working, reportedly playable at reasonable speed (never saw it myself) XBox 360 emulator for PC around, I think maybe 2008 or 2009?

To be clear, that is an insane technological accomplishment, to have it running at playable speeds on PCs of the time.

I got despondent working at Microsoft because I saw so much cool technology just fall by the wayside, or get mismanaged, or get a v1 launched early and then have no one believe in the v2.

Amazon Astro, their semi-autonomous robot, yeah MS tried to do that in 2012 or so. Failed because the tech wasn't ready yet (and for many other reasons!)

Microsoft tried to do eBooks back in 2000. Oops, way too early.

[1] Windows Mobile pre WP 7 was never meant to be a consumer product. Working on it I was told very bluntly that the target audience was corporate, and specifically corporate IT departments who were doing the purchasing. Pre-iPhone Microsoft even had a nice little report from some research firm saying consumers would never pay for a cellphone, they would only, en mass, get cell phones for free from their provider in return for the 2 year contract lock in. This was myopic as fuck. As a new college hire I felt like banging my head against the wall every single day for the horrible business decisions that I saw being made, and this was before the iPhone was announced!

An example of this closed mindset: When I first started at work I got my company Windows Mobile device, and shortly thereafter I went out shopping for a new TV. I was at the store wondering which one to get when I realized I could pull out my phone and do research right there. I literally stopped in my tracks and realized that having the internet in my pocket was going to be a huge societal shift. When I told my coworkers what had happened, even the next youngest member on the team dismissed what I said as being inconsequential.

Year later, same co-worker was proudly showing off the barcode scanning app on his iPhone that let him comparison shop in stores...