Once again, like touch interfaces, tablets, mobile phones, Microsoft was early in the development, but just couldn't capture the market.
Was it due to under-investment? Are they not asking the right questions? Not properly solving a need? Or just trying to stuff windows into all these places without recognizing it doesn't fit?
As someone who worked for MSFT a long time ago, I feel like Microsoft picks the right technologies and pumps huge sums of money into it but their understanding of use cases and UX is really poor (compare to say, Apple, who REALLY understands UX). The more PMs there are the muddier the waters are on actually using things. You end up with something like Office, that has so many options and whizbangs that people struggle to use the basic stuff. And just look at them talking about taking away the Control Panel, which I think was only aborted by how bad the reception was.
As more recent example, see the Windows desktop mess, or how they started to push Blazor Hybrid inside of MAUI, alongside the whole MAUI rewrite, mudding the waters of MAUI's purpose.
How many way there are now to do Web apps in ASP.NET, classical MVC, Razor Pages, Blazor Server, Blazor Client, Blazor Fullstack,...
Was it due to under-investment? Are they not asking the right questions? Not properly solving a need? Or just trying to stuff windows into all these places without recognizing it doesn't fit?