> None of the handset makers back then were in a position to come up with a workstation class OS, with desktop class application development frameworks and highly tuned power management and commercial level software development tool chains.
Did you ever use early Android? It was impressively bad.
Yes and you're right, it took the Android team years to catch up, but they started a massive course correction effort basically the day the iPhone was announced. Google realised how much of a threat the iPhone was and threw everything they had at getting Android up to speed. My point is the incumbent phone handset companies didn't have those sorts of resources in skilled development teams with system level experience and support services available to throw at anything.
Microsoft left it for years, believing they could still compete using their single tasking Windows CE kernel based platform. That's why Windows 8 with a true pre-emptive multitasking NT based kernel, able to run background services and run on multiple cores wasn't ready until 2012. By then Android had already had it's act together for a few years and it was too late for MS.
Did you ever use early Android? It was impressively bad.