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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @11:15AM (12 children)
And it turns out Windows isn't a great mobile OS. Apple and Google both realized early on that the killer app for phones was the web. Microsoft never really got the hang of that, and in the mid-2000s was still trying to force the web to follow Microsoft rules rather than just develop new ways to take advantage of it. Microsoft was so afraid of losing their monopoly that they just stuck their head in the sand when they weren't able to control and make everything be Windows.
Early iPhones didn't even have the app store. Everything had to be done with web apps. Google, of course, was always web-first. Microsoft was still stuffing cramped, awkward PC software into a form factor that didn't fit.
Priorities and resources certainly weren't the problem. Android was developed for what Microsoft spends on coffee. They just didn't build any software that anyone wanted to use.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday June 25 2019, @11:53AM (5 children)
Strange, given the dominance of Internet Explorer on the desktop.
(Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Tuesday June 25 2019, @12:48PM (3 children)
As I recall now but wasn't IE more of an after thought when MS saw the rise of Netscape and wanted to control the Internet to. They had sort of completely missed it at first thinking that people wouldn't care much. Then they just bundled IE with the OS and *bam* instant scene domination. Then came the DOJ and started to poke around. So perhaps it wasn't really worth it considering the decade or so of trouble that followed.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday June 25 2019, @02:24PM (1 child)
IE and consumer internet access was an afterthought. When Windows 95 was developed and released, Microsoft was competing against information services, not the Internet. They had their own proprietary MSN service and were competing against Compuserve and AOL. TCP/IP networking was a headache to load and properly configure and it used a lot more memory.
It was really an incredible phenomena that few could have predicted. A lot of little independent service providers popped up, piggybacking on the POTS phone system for dial-up, providing a connection to the internet, and people set up their own information services where anyone using ANY internet service provider could access them.
This would not happen again today. It would be a choice between Facebook on-line service or Twitter on-line service.
Then, backpedaling with Windows 98 and IE 4 to crush Netscape they made IE an unremovable "OS component", changed the UI so you couldn't breathe without touching IE, and broke many legs getting programmers to make their desktop software to absolutely require IE. Such a mess that IE is still hiding under Microsoft Edge in Windows 10. Removing it would break things.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday June 25 2019, @06:57PM
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday June 26 2019, @12:04AM
Windows 95 was released with no browser at all originally. I bought a copy of Netscape Navigator for about $20 (I think) which may have been the only choice at the time.
Microsoft killed Netscape dead by giving IE away for free.
I seem to remember thinking IE 5 was the bees' knees.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @05:53PM
You need to read Gates' book, "The Road with a Head", where he totally missed the importance of networking, let alone on the scale of the internet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @03:14PM (2 children)
The web on mobile sucked back then, no matter what Apple and Google did. The SoCs were just not capable of handling desktop grade web sites.
Notice how quickly the focus moved to service specific apps once given the opportunity (after all, the original iPhone didn't have any semblance of apps at launch).
Nah, the big sell was media on a wifi capable device. Apple had a head start there via ITMS and the iPhone being a drop in replacement for an iPod.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @05:47PM
I used the iPod Touch to browse the web and watch videos back in the day. I think it was 1st or 2nd gen. The experience was often bad but it was still epic.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday June 26 2019, @12:09AM
I seem to remember the big sell with the original iPhone was that it wasn't a Blackberry (which some of my users at the time hated).
The email experience for the end users was really good if I remember correctly. We did have a huge problem with people stealing them from the couriers though.
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Tuesday June 25 2019, @03:19PM (2 children)
it turns out Windows isn't a great mobile OS.
Windows Mobile/WinCE is in fact, an utterly appalling OS. There is no part of the steaming pile of shite, from the drivers to the GUI that are fit for anything,
let alone purpose, and "locked downfullness" is just more piss on the shit.
The hardware may have been OK, it was impossible to know, because whenever to tried to use it, software
usability issues and bugs prevented you. Particularly annoying was the fact that you were frequently required to restart
or reinstall, and this usually deleted all settings and data you had entered - using the device was so painful, you
ended up just leaving it in a draw and cursing.
Of course Symbian came up with "signed for Symbian" which guaranteed apps you bought would expire shortly after you paid for them,
and no realistic way to have FOSS apps on it, ensuring it died a death.
Gates is not the only cretin in high places.
And, yes, I could gladly spend an evening jumping up and down on Google.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by bussdriver on Tuesday June 25 2019, @04:40PM (1 child)
They only have had 2 monopolies. Windows and Office (which they got illegally using Windows.)
The phone was an accessory; at best it was a THREAT to their desktop monopoly product. They NEVER EVER would have undermined their Desktop OS so any other product could not risk it!
Ironically, their strength and intentionally strategy was to make Windows/MS software the path of least resistance - and their silly portable Windows OS attempts suffered from that which they wielded illegally against their competition. Their quality was almost always D or C level so the motivation was never there. They only could have made it on the phone market if they made their Desktop APIs capable of working on a tiny mobile device with no effort then making the phone a windows PC; without a decent monitor or keyboard/mouse. Luckily, they lacked the technology to put a windows PC on a phone at the time.... and most probably lacked the engineering skill to morph their APIs to handle that. Notice that they've somewhat gone down this path now; 20 years later -- but only for tablets.
BTW, the tablet computer concept was thought up by Apple and published in the 80s. Google "knowledge navigator".
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday June 25 2019, @07:02PM
Alternatively:
The tablet computer concept was thought up by Douglas Adams and published in 1979. Google "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
(Bonus obligatory xkcd link [xkcd.com])