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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: 2, Interesting) by Bot on Tuesday June 25 2019, @08:51AM (3 children)
The simple truth that escapes mr. Gates is that microsoft was the most handicapped one in the race for the mobile.
Because the very thought of having whatever version of windows in your pocket at all times, should be classified as a form of torture.
Google could get away with putting a fragmented OS requiring constant updates and forcing obsolescence, which is exactly like windows, because it called itself something different than "microsoft" and called the stuff something different than "windows", and well because it started as a fairly open environment.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Tuesday June 25 2019, @10:21AM
The all-too frequent articles about his blatherings are quite uninteresting, uninformative, and irrelevant to anything happening in the industry today. That article, and he many others like it, was a poor choice for the main page. We got trolled again by aristarchus.
The only interesting take on Bill's most recent bloviations is that he appears to accidentally make a very strong case for regulating the hell out of that market [theverge.com]. He actually complains about not being able to leverage his desktop monoply like he had in other markets. Though in The Verge's article it is described as a "network effect" instead of illegal abuse of a monopoly. He really is a one-trick pony.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday June 25 2019, @11:49AM (1 child)
Back in the days of PDAs, pushing the Windows brand onto them mis-managed customers' expectations. The hardware wasn't anywhere near as capable as desktop machines were, so anyone who expected the same Windows interface and all their existing programs available on their new pocket device were bound to be disappointed.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @12:29PM
By 2008, Gates was no longer CEO And before this time Nokia was dominate with its own OS. There was simply no way to market an OS only. You had to do the phone and OS together, exactly like Apple did.