Having a nerdy vision of the future and spending tens of billions of dollars to try and make it a reality while shareholders and bean counters crucify you for it is the most engineer thing imaginable. What other CEO out there is taking such risks?
Tablet PC (first iteration was in the early 90s!), Pocket PC, WebTV and Media Center PC (Microsoft first tried Smart TVs in the late 90s! There wasn't any content to watch and most people didn't have broadband, oops), Xbox, and the numerous PC standards they pushed for (e.g. mandating integrated audio on new PCs), smart watches (SPOT watch, look it up!), and probably a few others I'm forgetting.
You'll notice in most of those categories, they moved too soon and others who came later won the market.
