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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) 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])