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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, @03:26PM (3 children)
Err, MS had been working on "tablets" since the 90s at least.
MS introduced the UMPC at least a year before Apple unveiled their iPhone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-mobile_PC [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday June 25 2019, @03:53PM (2 children)
Microsoft's vision of a Tablet was that it would run Desktop Windows. Modified to try to work in a tablet form factor. And it wasn't a bad attempt. If there had been no iPad to compare to, it might have succeeded.
The point is that Microsoft's focus was Windows everywhere. Rather than the Steve Jobs approach of start with the product and end user and then work back to the engineering. Microsoft would (and many would) naturally start with what do we have to work with, and how do we best adapt it to the new requirement.
Microsoft saw a Windows centric world. Probably also seeing the tablet as an auxiliary device to the desktop, since a Windows Tablet is not as easy to use as a desktop (or an iPad). You might not spend as much time web surfing on a Windows Tablet as you would on the Desktop PC or on an iPad.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @06:59PM (1 child)
Personally, I'd much rather use a Surface, which is a real computer, than an iPad, which is a glorified phone but without the phone. And I'm not the only one - Surface sales are growing 21% [techradar.com] per year, while iPad sales are, well, not (although they have recovered somewhat from the huge declines of a couple of years ago).
Ironically, the situation with the Surface and the iPad is almost the reverse of the iPhone and Windows Mobile. The Surface runs real software that is actually useful, and the iPad runs crippled imitation software that is basically just a novelty gimmick. In Microsoft's language, the Surface is long-term credible. The iPad's niche seems to be in kiosks, point of sale, and the like, where its limitations matter less, and among people who just have to buy things that have fruit drawn on them.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday June 25 2019, @09:38PM
The Surface and the Windows Tablet experiments of the mid 2000s are light years apart.
Personally, I like a nice Pixelbook. Because Linux. I don't do Windows. (except at work) But I had to jump through a few hoops to get what I consider a good Chrome OS, Android, Linux desktop mixture setup. So even when using an Android app, or a Linux desktop, the Chrome OS is always listening for me to say "hey google, what's the weather?"
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.