Microsoft's foray into phones was a bumbling, half-hearted fiasco, and Nadella always knew it

Steve Ballmer as Microsoft chief executive bought Finnish former smartphone giant Nokia in 2013. Satya Nadella, who took over from Ballmer in 2014, sold what Ballmer had bought just two years later.

That sale came nearly a decade after Ballmer laughed off the thing that promoted Microsoft's decision to buy Nokia and thereby establish a foothold in the smartphone market in the first place.

Back in 2007, as Apple released its first iPhone, Ballmer fatally – as it turned out – couldn't conceive why anybody wouldn't be content simply owning a keyboard-driven feature phone running Windows. Or how the iPhone could upend Microsoft's phone business.

In his new book, Hit Refresh, Nadella reckons he actually voted "no" to his predecessor's proposed purchase of Finland's one-time leader in mobile phones. It was a catch-up play.

Due to a series of missteps, misfortunes and misjudgements, Microsoft left the mobile market, with nothing to show for it but broken partnerships and waning influence in an increasingly mobile-first world.

As Nadella tells it: "I did not get why the world needed the third ecosystem in phones, unless we changed the rules... But it was too late to regain the ground we had lost. We were chasing our competitors' taillights."

Microsoft's struggle with mobile will surely go down as another black mark on the firm's track record of coming late to market, of refining its product and of eviscerating the competition through a combination of product, pricing and channel and partner relationships. As the creator of the world's most widely used desktop operating systems and one-time browser king, it was inconceivable that Microsoft would be unable to similarly dominate the mobile market.

Yet, due to a series of missteps, misfortunes and misjudgements, Microsoft left the mobile market, with nothing to show for it but broken partnerships and waning influence in an increasingly mobile-first world.

A brief recap of Microsoft's mobile exploits seems appropriate at this point.

After the release of the iPhone and subsequently Android-based smartphones, Microsoft realised that its efforts to bring Windows to mobile were too enterprise-focused and clunky to survive in a post-iPhone world. In 2010, Microsoft announced the Windows Phone 7 series and followed it up with a partnership with Nokia in 2011. With the Lumia line as its flagship, Windows Phone quickly became hailed as the fastest-growing smartphone platform, quickly surpassing BlackBerry to become a somewhat popular third choice in the EU-5 region. To capitalise on that success, Ballmer pushed for a deal to purchase Nokia's Devices and Services division, which was deemed good for corporate synergy. Now Microsoft would design both the hardware and the software. Shortly afterwards, it all fell apart.

The first issue here was that Microsoft as a whole never really wanted to buy the division. Ballmer pushed for the purchase and essentially forced it through, but the shareholders were far from convinced.

As Nadella suggested, Microsoft would forever be third place in mobile even if it had continued striving. At that time, despite being the third largest ecosystem, Windows Phones still struggled to reach 4 per cent in the US, with its growth mostly powered by low-end handsets like the Lumia 520 and 521.

Sponsored: The Joy and Pain of Buying IT - Have Your Say

Source: Microsoft's foray into phones was a bumbling, half-hearted fiasco, and Nadella always knew it