>>Look at the mobile debacle- In my honest opinion shareholders should have flayed a generation of MS executives for ceding the desktop of the future to an upstart with absolutely no User Interface heritage.

People said similar things when Netscape scooped MS in the browser world.
They were right about MS's lack of vision, but wrong in their predicitions of what would happen to MS because of it.
Then there was MS' lack of vision with the OS.
Remember OS/2? Remember LISA? Remember Novell?
Then Win 95/NT blew the top off computing and ushered in one of the biggest booms we've ever had in business computing.

Calling anything the desktop of the future is a bit premature, I think.

The current chaos and jockeying in the mobile world has echoes of the micro computer world (Remember the Commodore and the S100 bus?) before the IBM PC came along in 1982 and settled all the arguments.
After one glance at it, we all generally agreed that a new standard had arrrived and got busy figuring out how to make money with it.

I don't see anything similar yet in the mobile world but I'm sure it will arrive or emerge.
Meanwhile, healthy debate and analysis of the would-be winners is productive and useful, but I wouldn't bet my retirement on the short trade of MS.