Longhorn, Zune, phone, Skype, bungie , among many other failures. I was there, as a kid of the 80s, Microsoft, Windows, Visual Basic, VStudio were EVERYTHING up until around 2003, they just dropped too many balls.
It was botching Mobile that really did Balmer in and possibly not reacting quite quickly enough to the need for Enterprise-grade Cloud Computing while Amazon was bootstrapping AWS right in Microsoft's back yard.
They got the cloud situation under control but losing Mobile to Apple and Google was a disaster and they're paying for it still.
Longhorn, Zune, phone, Skype, bungie , among many other failures. I was there, as a kid of the 80s, Microsoft, Windows, Visual Basic, VStudio were EVERYTHING up until around 2003, they just dropped too many balls.