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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: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @01:19PM
Microsoft had early adopters. They tried Microsoft PocketPC in 2000. Then they tried Windows Mobile 2003. Then Windows Mobile 5. Then Windows Mobile 6. Then Windows Phone 7. Then Windows Phone 8. Then Windows Phone 10.
Each time, Microsoft announced something, sold it, and then dumped it and released something new with different features and new APIs that was largely not backwards compatible. Windows Mobile 6 apps didn't work on Windows Phone 7, etc... etc...
So the early adoption customers got burned, and more importantly the early adoption application vendors got burned too.
I hate Microsoft and I hate Bill Gates. But Windows conquered the desktop world due to a combination of dirty tricks and fanatical focus on backwards compatibility. Microsoft brought the dirty tricks to mobile, but dumped the backwards compatibility and that's what killed them. If Google dumped and restarted Android six times, it would have never gone anywhere either.