Posted on 06/24/2019 8:25:37 AM PDT by dayglored
Nope: it was not giving Android a run for its money...
Bill Gates has said his biggest management miscalculation was failing to position Microsoft's Windows Phone as the primary rival mobile operating system to Apple's iOS.
Speaking at venture capital beanfeast Village Global last week, Gates said that although the company he founded had not missed mobile phones it had gone about things the wrong way. Although Gates stepped down as CEO in 2008, it is fair to say he retained an interest in the company he founded and remained chairman until 2014.
Gates, sporting a natty pink jumper, said: "The greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is that is the standard phone platform non-Apple phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win."
The grey-haired 63-year-old said the software world, especially for platforms, is all about winner-takes-all markets. He said a company with half as many apps or even 90 per cent as many apps was on its way to complete doom: "There's room for exactly one non-Apple operating system, and what's that worth? $400bn that would be transferred from company G to company M."
Gates said if Microsoft had got that right, it would be the leading company in the world, not just one of the leaders.
Microsoft's mobile strategy has been rebooted several times. It killed its Windows Mobile and brought in Windows Phone, along the way buying Nokia before finally leaping off the platform and throwing in the towel.
Steve Ballmer was not alone in doubting the chances of the iPhone making serious sales, especially in business, because it lacked a keyboard. But Microsoft moved to gesture and touch interfaces for mobile too slowly to succeed.
Microsoft is killing off support for Windows 10 Mobile on 10 December this year.
Gates has previously admitted not investing enough in Internet Explorer as his major error.
Google bought Android, based on the Linux kernel, to run on its phones in 2005. The core operating system is available via an open source licence, although Google also sells a set of proprietary software apps and services. This approach has made Android the world's largest mobile operating system. Although Microsoft has softened on its approach to open source software, such a strategy would have been a big shift for the company back in 2005.
Whether Gates is right that there is room for only one non-Apple mobile OS is also open to question American pres Donald Trump's ban on Google and other American firms working with Huawei has seemingly forced the Chinese company, the world's second largest handset maker, to create its own platform. ®
Good point. In post #20, I mentioned the opposition to Windows entering the phone market. They backstabbed and kneecapped so many developers on the desktop that nobody trusted them. Every other developer expected MS, when it got the majority of the phone market, to start creating their own native apps and choking off other developers like they did with Windows desktop. Just about every developer outside of Redmond was united against them.
The English always were a tad bit on the weird side in my opinion. 8>)
I’ve always despised Microsoft, Ballmer and Gates and their media sychophants. Windows is, and has always been a piece of sh1t.
I developed all my products for OS/2, a far superior and truly O-O operating system. To prove this, just perform a file move from one folder to another.
OS/2 still exists, was eComStation, now is ArcaNoae. Still far superior to Windows, Linux, and any other OS on the market.
I paid a high financial price for sticking to my firm beliefs. But even today, I would make the same decision. I will never give my customers crap. And Windows is crap!
Eh, not quite fair.
Microsoft bought DOS (86-DOS, a.k.a. QDOS) from Seattle Computer Products for a measly $50K, re-branded it MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM as PC-DOS. All perfectly legal business.
OTOH, given what it was worth later, you might characterize it as "theft", but not in a legal sense, only in an ethical sense.
Over the years, Microsoft developed a lot of things on their own, and purchased and absorbed many more. They practiced many predatory business practices and got in trouble for it. They used the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" with many standards and protocols.
But it's not fair to say they never created anything -- they did. Some were successes, some were failures.
“”sporting a natty pink jumper” will never be used after my name. “
Unless natty is short for Natalie.
Pretty much true. I was in the UNIX world when gates and microsoft came on the market so we were interested in interfacing with ms/dos.
Gates was a dick.
Apple was much more accommodating, but that was understandable because ms/dos was getting bigger, faster and thought they didn't need any Unix vendors.
One of the dirtiest tricks in the Microsoft Book of Dirty Tricks.
As a developer whose applications and utilities had to run on Windows, that crap made me furious.
I grew sick and tired of Windows breaking stuff for no apparent reason other than Microsoft not being honest.
It's one of the main reasons I primarily use Linux and MacOS these days, and go into a Windows VM only for those tools that only run on Windows, or to test a cross-platform application on Windows. And hoping to God it doesn't fetch up against yet another place where Microsoft lied or screwed up. It's really freakin' annoying.
It could have been so much better.
Personally I don't blame Gates as much as Steve Ballmer. That man did more damage to Microsoft, and everything around it, than you can imagine.
One of my all-time favorites!
I nominate that Word is still not as good as WordPerfect was 20 years ago.
Microsoft’s biggest managerial mistake was going to their current update system. Their second was letting the QA deteriorate in their current update system. The third may be changing their licensing model, we’ll have to see about that one. All IMHO, of course.
That is correct Windows CE phones/pda were out in Europe well before the iPhone. When I move back to the US I was very disappointed in not seeing a CE phone on the market.
Microsoft had great products, they just had very poor marketing. I still use a Microsoft 950 phone today, the Camera outperforms todays Iphone. Thinking about buying a backup 950, just in case.
I'm sure you recall that prior to the IBM-PC and the rise of MS-DOS, Microsoft -WAS- a Unix company. In fact it was -the- Unix company, in some respects.
Remember XENIX? The Unix variant with the largest installed base (at that time)? That was Microsoft's product, from the time they licensed it from AT&T in 1978 until they sold it to SCO in 1987.
Microsoft positioned XENIX as their "multi-tasking, multi-user" operating system, and MS-DOS as their "single-tasking, single-user" operating system.
So I'm not sure what your comment refers to.
Among other things, they could have forestalled the rise of GNU/Linux to its current position as the premier server OS.
Windows is a poor general-purpose server OS -- it's an applications platform. Works fine for Windows applications, but it's awful for general server use.
Maybe, though, it's better that they tossed XENIX aside. Think of a world with only Microsoft operating systems.... (shudder) :-)
Do you know, OS/2 was developed by the team at Microsoft that for the previous decade had been their XENIX (Unix) development team?
"...[Microsoft] agreed with IBM to develop OS/2, and the Xenix team (together with the best MS-DOS developers) was assigned to that project..."That explains some of OS/2's excellence.
-- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix)
Bill did everybody a favor by marrying Melinda and getting her out of management.
:-)
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