**Update 8/18/14: After reading this article about how much of a mess the Windows App store has become I highly doubt Microsoft can become a viable player in the smartphone market.

Microsoft has recently made it very clear that they are not giving up on the Windows Phone and that it just needs time and effort to fully get off the ground.

Fold in the Nokia sales team, beef up the security features to make it attractive to enterprise users. Pay internal and external developers more to build tools and port apps over to the platform. We know the enterprise cash cow (read: Windows) backing this push isn’t going away, unlike Blackberry for example, so why wouldn’t Microsoft’s mobile push succeed?

Microsoft usually operates on the third time is a charm principle, and the Windows 8 phone is only the second iteration, so they even have time by their standards. When they took over Nokia the docs showed a 15% market share target for their smartphone business. Sounds doable for a juggernaut like Microsoft right; increase product quality, throw some capital around, and continue to persevere because everyone knows mobile is the future. Unfortunately, I see little hope in this strategy just by looking at the numbers of smartphones in circulation.

Projections for the end of 2013 put Android circulation numbers at +1bn, iPhones +300m, and Windows Phones at around 50m. This battle is already over for Microsoft, they just don’t want to give up on something they know is important. Just by looking at those three numbers, there really is no reason for a developer to create an app for Windows Phones. And the same goes for entrepreneurs deciding which platform to create their business on first. If a platform doesn’t support apps I frequently use, then every product using that platform are ruled out of my buying process.

This begs the question of what else Microsoft should be doing. What are they hoping to accomplish by redoubling their efforts for more mobile market share? Are they extending their old-school “Windows Everywhere” strategy to mobile? Personally, I would love to see Microsoft tackle the Android ecosystem from a corporate perspective. Android is on a meteoric rise and the fragmentation problems are only getting worse, so much so that it might become an unusable platform for corporations who need a stable/secure ecosystem. The Google suite including Google Apps, Gmail, Docs, Drive, and Hangouts, solves some corporate needs but clearly lack the enterprise chops of most enterprise products created by Microsoft.

If Microsoft gave up on making it’s own mobile platform a world of possibilities opens up. Valuable products for the mobile world like a complete ROM for Android, secure business apps for iOS, and most importantly put enterprise cornerstones Office and Exchange on iPads (update 10/15: this is actually happening, read here). Once Microsoft focuses on a platform that developers already willingly code for, everything becomes a lot easier. Let Apple do the marketing and hardware, Google takes care of the fragmentation and platform updates, and Microsoft focus on what they do best, making corporate software.