In the browser wars that began in the 1990s, it took more than a decade for regulators to stop Microsoft exploiting its dominance with users of Windows software. In today’s mobile battles, customers have done so themselves in six months. Microsoft’s rapid retreat over Windows 8 – the latest, mobile-inspired, version of its operating software – shows wise flexibility rather than its traditional obstinacy. But it also demonstrates that Steve Ballmer, the company’s chief executive, has lost the power to “embrace and extend” the Windows hegemony into new fields.

Nearly three decades of technology history have ended. From the moment in 1985 when Bill Gates released the first version of an operating system for the new IBM personal computer, Microsoft has had a huge entrenched advantage against its competitors. Many of them – from Lotus to Netscape and, for a time, Apple – were flattened.

But that won’t happen to Apple or to Android, the big players in the new world of software for smartphones and tablets. Mr Ballmer’s use of a trusted strategy – to push Microsoft’s latest piece of software on consumers via the Windows desktop – has just backfired badly.