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Bill Gates calls losing the smartphone market to Android his "greatest mistake"
It is rare to see a company owning up to their mistakes but in a Techcrunch interview published yesterday ex-Microsoft CEO and founder Bill Gates just did, calling losing the smartphone market to Google's Android his "greatest mistake."
I am stifling myself with ecto-ironic beams of death, to avoid commenting on the initial sentence. Help me, Soylentils!
He also owes up to mismanagement – it was a war which Microsoft could have won – Windows Mobile preceded Android by nearly 10 years, but Microsoft never understood the importance of mobile, never gave it adequate resources, was distracted by desktop priorities and was constantly changing direction.
[...] The point of this article is not to replay the past, but to counter this view expressed by those who take Microsoft's current share price as proof that losing mobile was actually a happy accident:
$MSFT, in 3yrs, has climbed from $35 to an all time high of $137 w/ positive Q3FY19 gains in generally every business, incl. Windows.
...but please tell me more abt how Microsoft's downfall will be a consequence of its retreat from Windows Phone, Microsoft Band, & Groove Music. pic.twitter.com/4IOb6ptEJb— kurtsh (@kurtsh) June 22, 2019
Microsoft's future is in bitcoin. You heard it here first!!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Dr Spin on Tuesday June 25 2019, @08:51AM (5 children)
... was obviously high in the chain of command, but who the hell thought that slapping customers with a wet fish was a good marketing strategy.
By which I mean selling you products with crap software, and then refusing to provide updates with bug fixes.
The reason Apple succeeded in dominating the mobile phone industry in the early days was because, despite manufacturing both hardware and software,
it was clear they were going to provide software upgrades and bug fixes - although new OS versions might be a chargeable option.
I, and many colleagues, had been repeatedly shafted by "WinCE" and like shite. You not only bought the products, you bought into the concept, buying
stands, adaptors and stuff, which cost a lot of money. As soon as you realised how crap the OS was, they released a new one, and refused to allow you to
update the old hardware, expecting you to buy new - making it blatantly obvious that you would be up the creak without a paddle again if you did!
Although I have never bought an Apple products, (I was over-committed to Nokia at the time, and as a FOSS supporter, went for Android early) I predicted,
loudly, and everywhere, that MS would never be able to survive in the phone world after the iPhone because the amount of abuse they had heaped on
existing customers ensured no one would ever buy an MS mobile product twice.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday June 25 2019, @10:12AM (1 child)
M$ could not gain more than a peak of just under 3% market share [blogs.com] because of two reasons. First, the obvious, is that their phone software was as bad as everything else they make. People may be inured to that on the desktop but on phones they still had a choice of better options. Second, speaking of choice, M$ had no way to leverage the desktop monopoly and extend it into the phone market and prevent buyers from exercising their choices.
Bill has been a one-trick pony all along since when, in the 1980s, IBM was punished for illegal behavior and forced by the courts to choose between hardware and software for the new PC market. That left an opening for Bill's mom to move in and set Bill to score a deal with IBM, giving him an overnight monopoly. He was able to extend that into the infamous, illegal per-processor fees. That, in turn, gave him a such a war chest that he could afford to lose money indefinitely in any area he chose just to ensure that no one else made any money there either, until he could leverage the desktop monopoly to get into the new market and take it over. Again, he couldn't do that with the mobile phone market and even after Microsoft killed Nokia [seekingalpha.com], there was still no way to leverage that desktop monopoly into a means of establishing a foothold in the phone market.
tldr; there was no way for Bill to leverage his desktop monopoly against the phone market
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @10:31PM
This. While BILLG will never admit the above, this is exactly why they lost the market.
The only reason MS ever succeed at anything was by leveraging their "windows monopoly" to force sales of whatever else it was they were pushing. And the only reason they were dominant in the PC OS market was their business deals with the makers that required a copy of windows be sold with every PC they shipped.
As a PC builder, what reason do you have to offer an "os free" version of your machine when you, the maker, would have to eat the windows tax. The result, unless one was willing to build from parts, it was not possible to buy a PC without sending money to MS. Many businesses drool over being able to create such a guaranteed revenue stream (this is the reason for the rise of all the 'subscription' software services lately, guaranteed revenue streams).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @03:04PM
Honestly i think most people could not care squat about updates.
The big selling point of iPhone was that it was a drop in upgrade for an iPod, but now you didn't have to carry a phone alongside it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bussdriver on Tuesday June 25 2019, @04:09PM
Other than Microsoft's BASIC (1st product) they ALWAYS played catch up and missed almost everything. He didn't see DOS coming and even played catch up MS-DOS (bought the CP/M OS at the last second.) Once they had a monopoly Gates was good at ruthlessly and anti-competitively maintaining that; which they leveraged unfairly to push every failure... with MS-Office being one of their few successes (plus they bought Excel etc. so they don't get much credit there either.)
They didn't grasp smart phones at ALL; it was just catch up to integrating windows with phones for more VENDOR LOCK IN. Then when Apple showed everybody the future they played catch up AGAIN and like the Zune, their existing monopoly didn't prove capable of FORCING users outside their desktop monopoly. Furthermore, the Government (US & EU) did deter MS from pulling their old illegal tactics; otherwise iPods, iPhones, Andriod... would be attacked by Windows OS; MS software would act like malware on those devices as well. Just like MS illegally did in the 1980-1990s.
MS only made it by being "good enough" and/or the path of least resistance since they'd make sure the competition's users suffered more than their own as far as they could get away with... in the end they were finally caught. Unchecked, today they'd have gone so far as censoring website access before enough backlash stopped them (I don't mean obviously blocking; they always preferred excuses... like incompatibility, non-standard, insecure, etc.)
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday June 25 2019, @09:49PM
It is not "Miss" Management.
Nor Mrs. Management.
But Ms. Management.
Because Microsoft = MS, and mismanagement is to "Miss" the next big thing. Almost twice. One was the internet which Bill Gates famously said was just "a fad". No doubt because it didn't fit in his world of desktop PCs.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.