SoylentNews

Bill Gates Blames Antitrust Investigation for Failure of Windows Mobile and Rise of Android

posted by martyb on Saturday November 09 2019, @07:59AM   
from the antitrust-works dept.

takyon writes:

Bill Gates Says You Would Be Using Windows Mobile & Not Android Right Now If It Weren't for the Pesky Feds...

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."

Related:
Nadella: Microsoft Isn't Killing Windows Phone and Will Go It Alone
Steve Balmer: Use Android to Save Windows Phone
Microsoft Breaks its Windows 10 Mobile Upgrade Promise
Microsoft Axes 2,850 More Windows Phone, Sales Staff
Windows Phone Dies, Aged 6
It's Been 5 Years Already, Let's Gawp at Microsoft and Nokia's Bloodbath
Microsoft is Embracing Android as the Mobile Version of Windows

---

Original Submission

• No vision (Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Saturday November 09 2019, @06:32PM

  by stormwyrm (717) on Saturday November 09 2019, @06:32PM (#918349) Journal

  Sorry, Bill, it wasn't antitrust that killed MS's efforts at mobile. It was your company's lack of vision. Microsoft was working on mobile computing long before Google even existed, but all their efforts in mobile were meh. Somehow they couldn't even manage to play catch-up to Apple when it was looking like they had a winner with the iPhone. Google managed it, and it shouldn't have been too hard for a company with as much resources as MS to do likewise. So MS buys Nokia's Mobile Handset division and scraps their efforts at their own mobile platform. So far, so good. But what did they replace Maemo/MeeGo with? Windows Phone 7, and later Windows Phone 8, neither of which is compatible with the other. So the developers who might have started making apps for it get the impression that MS doesn't really know where they're going with this, and dump the platform. Steve Ballmer was at the helm at the time, IIRC, but he'd forgotten all about "Developers Developers Developers!" If he hadn't, then maybe they might have succeeded in making a third viable mobile platform that would have been a serious contender to iOS and Android.

  --
  Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		2