Bill Gates has said that he thinks everyone would be using Windows Mobile right now and not Android if it weren't for his distractions and the antitrust investigation that his company got caught into.
"There's no doubt that the antitrust lawsuit was bad for Microsoft, and we would have been more focused on creating the phone operating system and so instead of using Android today you would be using Windows Mobile," Gates claimed during his speech at The New York Times' DealBook Conference.
[...] Microsoft cofounder also revealed that the company was almost launching Windows Mobile on a Motorola handset but missed out on it by a few months, giving Android an unbeatable advantage. While there were a lot of factors, Gates says it's this 3-months delay that led to Android's supremacy and the downfall of any mobile efforts by Microsoft.
"We were just three months too late on a release Motorola would have used on a phone, so yes it's a winner takes all game."
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Saturday November 09 2019, @09:18AM
It could be MS's established reputation for a slow buggy and clumsy mobile OS.
They actually did cram Windows on a Motorola phone. It's responsiveness was worse than glacial.
They even tried buying a cellphone manufacturer, since that was the only way they could get their crap crammed into a phone at all. But even Nokia's former reputation for high quality phones couldn't keep that abomination afloat. The fact is, it was still slow, still clunky, and the hardware was underwhelming.