If Microsoft is the 'platform for everything,' does it really need a phone?

Before smartphones, Windows was the platform for virtually all personal computing.

In a multi-device, multi-OS world, Microsoft is now positioning the cloud, Microsoft Graph, Windows Mixed Reality and quantum computing as the platforms that all other platforms will run on. In simpler times, personal computing, to most people and businesses, meant sitting at a Windows PC using first- and third-party programs to get things done or to be entertained. Other desktop OSes offered little competition to Microsoft's Windows.

Smartphones, the mobile OSes they would popularize, and the app ecosystems they would introduce hadn't yet challenged Microsoft's personal computing hegemony. And the internet, which would become the backbone that would power the mobile OSes that would rival Windows PCs as the nexus of personal computing, had not yet been mainstreamed.

The world was smaller, and the realm of personal computing was Windows - until it wasn't. Many people argue that Microsoft needs a mobile presence to become relevant in the age of mobile computing. Perhaps it does, and there is indeed a place for that. But the company's ambitious cloud and Microsoft Graph platform strategy, which is meant to support the breadth of the industry's of apps, systems and devices, is a far grander prize.

Put another way, if you own the ocean, do you really need a boat?

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