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contentvoid

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XP, for example, has some level of support into 2014, so from a business perspective one can trust that they'll provide support for quite some time, that is something you won't get from Apple. How this has any bearing on a discussion of Microsoft's consumer relevance I am not sure.

As pointed out the Zune lives on but I think it'd be difficult to argue it really made a substantive splash in the market despite arguably being a superior device as well as having the (imho) very strong Zune Pass subscription service. We're four years in and I can count on one hand how many people I've known that owned a Zune. There are parallels with WP7 launch but the stakes are much higher this time around because the relevance of the desktop is waning for general consumer use and Microsoft needs something to replace it. WP7 is an inflection point, if it fails I think you'll see Microsoft go roughly down the same path IBM has as far as consumer relevance (unless perhaps they turn Xbox Live into a OnLive-esque games as service thing, which they are in a better position than Sony or Nintendo to do).

I'm more inclined to think the phone will fail for the same reasons the Zune did, too little too late. But then the media player market was much broader and more saturated in 2006 than the smartphone market is now so maybe it won't play out in the same way...