If Microsoft had “won” in Mobile by licensing Windows Mobile, where would it have gotten them? Google “won over” OEMs and got a whopping $21 billion in profit over eight years for their trouble.
Control of android or being the alternative safe choice that everyone builds apps for is worth a lot of money, but you can also use it to reinforce use of your core apps, like google's gmail and search. microsoft instead lost people from using office apps on android, as they market decayed. sure, they are huge and rich and can afford it, and eventually got to office 360 and android versions of office apps. But it would have been even better for them have never had to suffer loss of marketshare to google docs, and they were fortunate to not loose too much share.
I doubt that there are too many professionals using GSuite on phones in the place of Office and the high end and midrange Android tablet market is non existent.
I also doubt that too many people who are spending less than $300 on phones (the average selling price of Android phones) are the target market for Microsoft.
Statistically, Google has captured market share of people with less disposable income than Apple has. It’s at most Pyrrhic victory.
A large majority of "professional" software engineers use google email on their phones. And I've used gdocs etc at times on my phone continuously over the past 20 years, and many of them i was working at microsoft. Apples sales increased for a long time, even though google's sales increased faster apple was, i repeat was capturing most of the profit. We'll see if that happens. I expect several companies out of china to take the android market from samsung (still using android though).
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...
There was speculation that Microsoft made more from Android for years from patents than Google made.
Besides, Microsoft is still making pretty good money on mobile by targeting developers with Azure and tools like Xamarin