It kind of sounds like the sort of move you'd read about in a novella about power struggles... makes me think the board members in question here are plotting something, not simply trying to give the new CEO "breathing room".
Gates has for sure been propping up Ballmer for far too long. That has kept the status quo going long past effectiveness. The whole industry pulled one over on Microsoft cause Gates and Ballmer defended their monopoly from the DOJ long past when it became irrelevant... Which was exactly when The iPhone was released. The whole industry ceded "desktops" and invented new cheese Microsoft entirely failed to chase.
> The whole industry pulled one over on Microsoft cause Gates and Ballmer defended their monopoly from the DOJ long past when it became irrelevant... Which was exactly when The iPhone was released.
This is a bit of historical revisionism. Without the DOJ settlement, I think Microsoft wouldn't have played ball by licensing ActiveSync to Apple (and later, Google).
This single event (2008, I think) drove many people to the iPhone from Blackberry and sealed RIM's fate. iPhone+Exchange wasn't better than Blackberry+BES+(exchange/domino/groupwise), but it sure was cheaper and easier to maintain.
IBM came under a similar consent decree (European, late 80's IIRC) requiring them to document all their mainframe protocols to enable with 3rd party vendors to produce interoperable peripherials. I think it ultimately saved their business.
As a previous windows mobile device owner I would have to say: the touchscreen devices needed a pen to dial properly (no-go), the keyboard-driven devices were painful to do email on and had tiny screens, and both classes had horrible browsers (roughly IE4-level before the release of the iphone).
They also suffered from being too early in the smartphone / tablet market, having to make hardware/software trade-offs that precluded bringing a proper (desktop-like) OS to the mobile devices. Apple as a late entrant could reuse OS X and have developer API's with good forwards compatibility. Microsoft's only option was to ditch the whole OS and start over based on a new architecture, and it took them too long to swallow that bitter pill.
I think it is a symptom of MS being a software company. They lived with the hardware they had and supported any old crap compaq wanted to put into an iPAQ. Since Apple controlled the hardware their low end hardware was much better than MS's lowest supported hardware. It allowed Apple to do more in software, and jump past where MS was. MS's big problem is that they let that kind of thing continue for far too long.
TLDR Embedded systems need tight integration between HW and SW MS doesn't have it because they only do the SW and let others do HW.
They key change they dragged their heels was creating a new UI toolkit centered around touch interaction. That created a huge third party software gap vs iOS and made their devices look hampered.
