Where Microsoft really dropped the ball is their devices didn’t run windows apps. The surface RT was a disaster, and the phone wasn’t what the average consumer thought of when they thought of Microsoft. It’s be a herculean miracle to get a W7 lite x86 phone to run for more than a couple hours, but if they’d taken that approach, it would’ve changed the game.

Or they could’ve build a reliable x86 emulator on ARM, but that also would have been an engineering miracle.