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[CyberPanda]

At a recent event hosted by venture capital firm Village Global, highlighted by TechCrunch, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates lamented on losing to Android, calling it "one of the greatest mistakes of all time."

Skip to the 11:40 mark:



Transcript:

In the software world, it's very predictable for platforms. These are winner-take-all markets. The greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is. Android is the standard phone platform — non-Apple phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win. It really is winner take all. If you're there with half as many apps, or 90 percent as many apps, you're on your way to complete doom. There's room for exactly one non-Apple operating system. […]

It's amazing to me having made one of the greatest mistakes of all time… our other assets, Windows, Office, are still very strong… we are a leading company. If we'd gotten that right, we'd be the leading company.

In fairness to Gates, it was Steve Ballmer who served as Microsoft's CEO between 2000 and 2014. Ballmer infamously laughed off the iPhone, but Apple had the last laugh, as Windows Phone failed to ever gain any significant market share among mobile operating systems and is ultimately being abandoned.



Gates added that there is room for exactly one non-Apple mobile operating system, which is certainly the case as of today. Together, Android and iOS have an estimated 99.9 percent market share, according to research firm Gartner, having squeezed out former heavyweights like BlackBerry and Nokia.

Simply put, Apple upended the industry when it launched the iPhone in 2007, and Microsoft failed to respond. Windows Phone could have been the commoditized mobile platform, as Windows is to Mac, but Android won the battle.

Bill Gates Regrets Microsoft Losing to Android as Dominant Platform Beyond iPhone

At a recent event hosted by venture capital firm Village Global, highlighted by TechCrunch, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates lamented on losing to...

www.macrumors.com

 

[crowbrow]

Back then MS was still trying to stupidly fight against free and open software and spreading FUD on Linux trying to perpetuate their dated proprietary software based on Windows which sucks while Google was taking advantage of Linux and open software fully. They deserved to lose because MS refused to adapt and they thought they could bully the tech industry into using Windows. That might have worked for them in the 80s and 90s but not anymore.

 

[E-Cat]

Ballmer, what a bean counter. lol

 

[Rentahamster]

Something something developers developers developers developers developers developers developers

 

[JareBear: Remastered]

 

[petran79]

But Windows software reached #1 via piracy that was even endorsed by MS
Can't do that on smartphones

 

[SirKicksalot]

I still miss my Lumia. The interface and camera were amazing.
With Windows Mobile 8, Microsoft even got above 10% market share in Europe by late 2015 and then they pissed it away in just a couple of months. Windows 10 was a disaster, they didn't make cool new phones fast enough and the app store was a wasteland.
In March 2017 I got an update that Facebook Messenger would no longer be supported and the next day I switched back to Android.

 

[Tesseract]

eh you cannot win everything mister gates, no way in hell ms was prepared to take on android

 

[newtypepilot]

their biggest mistake is buying nokia for 8 billion and then gutted it from the inside.

 

[Alfen Dave]

I had a Nokia Lumia Windows Phone and bleieve it or not, actually prefered the UI and interface more than the Android one.

Something about it felt intuitive, simple, straight to the point.

I'm sad it has been discontinued.

 

[Aintitcool]

Even nokia lost its footing in cellphones. Blackberry killed bbm recently.

Only google and apple and the original android devs saw the distribution of touch and mobile apps as the new software gold rush it was.

 

[highrider]

As Microsoft has often done they hesitated to commit to competing fully and by the time they saw they needed to move it was too late. They probably would have ultimately made a great phone.

 

[MiyazakiHatesKojima]

Bill Gates > You

 

[Fox Mulder]

I had a Nokia Lumia Windows Phone and bleieve it or not, actually prefered the UI and interface more than the Android one.

Something about it felt intuitive, simple, straight to the point.

I'm sad it has been discontinued.

I had a Windows 8 phone and thought the OS was appealing and visually distinctive from what was out there. The phones were quality. The Nokia Here navigation app was way better than Google Maps back then.

It just had shit app support and was too late for them to get people to jump over in a world already dominated by Apple and Samsung's phones.

 

[juliotendo]

If Windows Phone 10 had the proper app support along with mobile phone surface-like hardware —— Microsoft would succeed.

The majority of Android phones in the wild are just garbage.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

As I said in another thread, I don't think Ballmer had a clue about anything outside of Windows and Office.

It can be the year 3000 and there aren't even computers anymore. Everyone has an implanted chip as a baby that can do anything PC related perfectly just by thinking about it.

And if Ballmer was alive in 3000, he'd be still trying to convince people to buy a computer and install Windows XP on it to play Solitaire.

 

[Super Mario]

Letting Apple takeover was a bigger mistake. Apple was nothing. This was a marketing game. It's never about the product itself. The Zune was far superior to the iPod, yet everyone laughed at the Zune. Why? Marketing.

 

[-Pyromaniac-]

Being too slow to take a risk could be the biggest risk.

 

[EverydayBeast]

Basically two decades of failed phones and music devices

 

[rorepmE]

Letting Apple takeover was a bigger mistake. Apple was nothing. This was a marketing game. It's never about the product itself. The Zune was far superior to the iPod, yet everyone laughed at the Zune. Why? Marketing.

Zune superior to the iPod.

Maybe in bullet point spec sheets.

 

[Super Mario]

Zune superior to the iPod.

Maybe in bullet point spec sheets.

I could watch videos on the Zune, at a cheaper price, with a bigger hard drive and screen, while the iPod classic had?

 

[A Regular Guy]

I still miss my Lumia. The interface and camera were amazing.
With Windows Mobile 8, Microsoft even got above 10% market share in Europe by late 2015 and then they pissed it away in just a couple of months. Windows 10 was a disaster, they didn't make cool new phones fast enough and the app store was a wasteland.
In March 2017 I got an update that Facebook Messenger would no longer be supported and the next day I switched back to Android.

The Lumia Icon was my favorite phone over any other Androids. I was sad that it got bricked and had to settle with a Samsung Galaxy phone.

 

[A Regular Guy]

If Windows Phone 10 had the proper app support along with mobile phone surface-like hardware —— Microsoft would succeed.

The majority of Android phones in the wild are just garbage.

They made a lot of promises with Windows Mobile 10, and I expected more as well with their tools that was able to emulate Play Store apps. Especially with the feature of docking your phone into a full fledge Windows desktop to work on Microsoft Office. So much potential wasted to converge the Windows Store as well.

 

[Pagusas]

Microsoft still hasn’t even got its windows app or game store right, they are still struggling after years to just get that off the ground, they were never ever going to succeed in the phone space.

 

[HUELEN10]

It pains me that Windows Phone lost the number 2 spot. I legitimately thought it was a great mobile OS, combining the best features of both smartphone and feature phones, great for ALL users, and with prices ranges and hardware for all.

 

[somerset]

MS tried as hard as it could to beat Android. It had and canceled maybe *three* multi million dollar tablet projects (remember this tech predated the phones, but led to the modern phone). It paid billions for the utter pile of sh-t that was *activesync*.

MS tried and failed cos MS is *sh-t* to the power infinity. Everything good MS offers originated outside of MS. Eugenicist Bill Gates only got the IBM contract that made MS a giant by selling another man's code to IBM, and passing it off as his own (legal tho).

Android won by emulating Windows- ain't that a kicker? MS was too dumb to think a tab/phone needed a proper ordinary OS. MS was on the dreadful Palm model. And Palm failed cos it wasn't like Windows.

But here's something not one of you know...

Windows NT (or which Windows 10 is but the latest version) was originally a *stop gap* at MS, while MS worked on its *real* OS, an *Object* based OS, which was the (braindead) computer science theory of the late 70s onwards. The Palm OS is an object based OS, which is why originally even something as simple as moving files was almost impossible on Palm devices.

While NT never died (when the penny finally dropped, and the trend for Object based file systems and OSes for proper computers ended), the Object idiocy for *new* devices was kept at MS. All of MS's new OSes that were not Windows were Object based- and they all failed cos of this.

It is hard to get across to non-techies (from forum posts that seems to be everyone here) excatly how wrong headed MS's thinking was. But also how trendy the object nonsense was amongst so many techies of the time. And I'm *not* talking about object based coding- that's another thing altogether- although it was the rise of object methods in coding that got hard-of-thinking techies to think objects were the solution for *everything*.

To make this object thing clearer- imagine you want to move a file from one storage device to another. Now you will (hopefully) say "what's the issue- I name the source file and the target destination". Well done- that's *sane* OS and file system thinking. But now let's consider how the object OS/file system freaks at MS saw the same operation.

1) you choose the source file via an *application* that *understands* that file type.
2) that application, and that application alone has the privileges that allow a file to be moved.
3) that application and that application alone chooses the *restrictions* on where the file can be moved to (target directories, new directories etc).
4) only file types recognised by approved apps are allowed

Anyone familiar with Palm OS will remember all that sh-t described above, and how only when later Palms had unofficial third party apps that could actually do non-object files ops did the palm become useful. God, I have a palm Zodiac (best Palm ever) and the initial issue of moving ebooks to the sdcard in the Palm was an effing nightmare thanks to its moronic Object based OS, with its own version of activesync.

To this day I cannot get over how many cretins at the heart of OS design believed in the future of Object based OS and file systems. And they haven't dried up and blown away either. Win 10 still, to this day, gets object based updates, trying to prevent flat use of files. File type association on current builds of Win 10 attempts to *ban* your own choice of program from working with those types of file that MS has an official list of apps for.

But yes, the concept of 'objects' is technical, obscure for most of you here, and pretty boring ot be honest. But it was 100% why MS lost in this key market.

PS one of MS's massive tab projects (pre-phone) had a *zombie* tablet whose screen data was to be rendered and then wirelessly transmitted by your main PC. Sound's quite modern- eh. But weeks before release, MS cancelled the project. Why? Cos back them MS was obsessed with Windows licenses, and the bean counters didn't like the idea of *one* windows key allowing a windows experience on the desktop and zombie tablet at the same time. Cos that was like two PC copies of Windows for the price of one.

To the same issue, ATI had a very popular card called the all-in-wonder that drove a TV output at the same time as the desktop monitor. MS *forced* ATI to break all the wonder products by disabling acceleration on both outputs at the same time, so you couldn't, say watch a film decoded by your PC on the TV while someone did homework on the monitor. Again so one copy of Windows wasn't meeting the needs of two sets of people at one time.

 

[JimiNutz]

Don't MS still make a nice profit on every Android phone that's sold though?
Something to do with patent royalties.

 

[Xaero Gravity]

I'm sure he regrets a lot of things, like naming his company after your penis.

 

[TTOOLL]

I loved my WP, so smooth and that black background was gorgeous.

their biggest mistake is buying nokia for 8 billion and then gutted it from the inside.

fuck Stephen Elop man, what he did was despicable.

Microsoft still hasn’t even got its windows app or game store right, they are still struggling after years to just get that off the ground, they were never ever going to succeed in the phone space.

This is true but let me tell you something, Windows app store is miles ahead of Mac app store, at least in terms of useful apps and games. Both have a lot of crap tho.

 

[Liftplus]

Looking at how much money is in that market im not surprised he regrets it.

 

[iconmaster]

Don't MS still make a nice profit on every Android phone that's sold though?
Something to do with patent royalties.

I believe so.

Software patents in mobile are a never-ending Mexican standoff.

 

[umutt i.]

Still miss my Lumia 735