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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @10:31PM
This. While BILLG will never admit the above, this is exactly why they lost the market.
The only reason MS ever succeed at anything was by leveraging their "windows monopoly" to force sales of whatever else it was they were pushing. And the only reason they were dominant in the PC OS market was their business deals with the makers that required a copy of windows be sold with every PC they shipped.
As a PC builder, what reason do you have to offer an "os free" version of your machine when you, the maker, would have to eat the windows tax. The result, unless one was willing to build from parts, it was not possible to buy a PC without sending money to MS. Many businesses drool over being able to create such a guaranteed revenue stream (this is the reason for the rise of all the 'subscription' software services lately, guaranteed revenue streams).