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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 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.)