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posted by takyon on Tuesday June 25 2019, @06:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the latest-mistake dept.

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!!


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Tuesday June 25 2019, @12:48PM (3 children)

    by looorg (578) on Tuesday June 25 2019, @12:48PM (#859688)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday June 25 2019, @02:24PM (1 child)

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Tuesday June 25 2019, @02:24PM (#859720)

    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

      by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 25 2019, @06:57PM (#859807)

      When Windows 95 was developed and released, Microsoft was competing against information services, not the Internet./quote>
      A case in point (from the consumer market): Microsoft Encarta.

  • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday June 26 2019, @12:04AM

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Wednesday June 26 2019, @12:04AM (#859928)

    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.