This is disturbing. One of the wealthiest and most successful businessmen in the world is still beating himself up about missing out on one important market, mobile phones.
That is strange, but what is most disturbing is how he is utterly certain that Microsoft deserved to have that market, that it would be better if Microsoft dominated that market as well, and that Microsoft missed out on that market because of high-level managerial errors, not because people didn't like Windows phone.
what is most disturbing is how he is utterly certain that Microsoft deserved to have that market
Words you're putting in his mouth. He did not say anything about deserving or certainty; when he says "we did screw up" that's an acknowledgement they had to compete for it, and failed to do that. People who think they deserve things, don't think they have to work hard and compete for them, and they don't reflect on what they did wrong but instead get affronted that the universe didn't simply hand them what the still feel they deserve.
> So, you know, the greatest mistake ever is the whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is, [meaning] Android is the standard non-Apple phone form platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win.
It's not quite a sense of entitlement, but Gates definitely thinks Microsoft could have won mobile if Microsoft made better decisions. He doesn't seem to be leaving much room for the idea that Google would have won even if Microsoft had done its best.
Microsoft had been building consumer hardware and software (X-Box, Pocket-PC, Windows Mobile) since ~2000 and Windows XP Tablet edition since 2002, and Zune, just about before iPhone. They owned the frontend on desktop and mobile, office and consumer. They had Exchange ActiveSync, one of the few possible competitors for Blackberry messaging, and they had hardware makers on board - just look at the list of companies which made Windows PocketPC devices, and the number of devices out for literally years before Google moved in the market at all:
It took them three years after iPhone to pivot to something multi-touch, (Windows Phone 7 in late 2010) and on release it had the limitations of the original iPhone release - no copy/paste, no custom rintones - and five years to get something with Windows NT kernel to compete with Apple's "It runs OS X".
If Microsoft had made better decisions, i.e. done what Apple did, and released a multitouch full-not-hobbled-software device as soon as the hardware was up to it, tuning Microsoft hardware and software together like they do now with the Surface range, there wouldn't have been a market gap for Google to enter.
And when Google did enter, the first Android released was the HTC Dream - coming out 18 months after iPhone release - and 6 months after iPhone had been discontinued and superceded - and being designed like a device from 2003. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Dream
If you'd asked people in 2005 who were the contenders for dominating the next decade of consumer mobile computing, what would they say? Would anyone seriously suggest Google anymore than Yahoo! or AOL or Compuserve?
Yes, it's a high-level managerial error (or a series of them) to make a phone that people don't like. Management's job in that situation is 1) figure out what people will want and 2) make what they want.
I think that Microsoft may not have been able to do that within their existing form. People didn't want Windows on a phone; they wanted a phone with apps. Microsoft probably tied the phone too much to existing Windows, whereas Android was much more tuned to writing apps for phones.
In the 80s, people wanted a desktop with apps, and Microsoft solved for that by just letting everyone make any app they wanted and not playing gatekeeper.
An MS phone using that model would be interesting. No app store. Just go ahead and run any random app you find on the internet. Probably a security nightmare.
But MS used a similar strategy to challenge Apple once before and did really well, security issues notwithstanding. So I'm kind of surprised they didn't make the same play.
He threatened OEMs into refusing to even offer better software from his competitors. He won a contest by rigging it, and then seems surprised that he couldn't win another contest on merit, like a mafia don who thought he was a legitimate businessman.
Indeed. Microsoft engaging in said behaviour with Compaq over beOS was directly responsible for my exploration of and ultimate preference for non-MS platforms in all things.
It's telling that marketing / branding / repuation doesn't factor into his internal model of Android vs. Windows phone.
At the time, google was doing a good job of branding itself ("do no evil") as an open, transparent (at least in terms of source code) and interoperable member of the community.
(oh how times / perceptions have changed...)
So google and had a lot of good faith with developers who were unhappy with Microsoft's ethics/business practices, browser war schennanigans, etc...
This played no small role in Android's early adoption and ultimate success.
Exactly! In my viewpoint, Microsoft had a terrible name. Windows 9x was unstable and a security nightmare (sure, it was cheap compared to UNIX desktops). Windows NT was more stable, and more secure, but it still had MSIE and ActiveX and MS Office which were all security nightmares. They might've worked well because they never took security serious. Eventually, the latter bit Microsoft in the ass.
Linux had a different name. Arguably, a better one. One of the weaknesses was software compatibility and UI complexity. Android didn't suffer from the former (as all of that was fixed before phone shipped), and tried to limit the latter with a new UI from the ground up (no X/KDE/GNOME etc).
Companies such as Google and Facebook take security serious. Because they're data driven companies, they want to protect that vehemently.
Once the pieces of the pie are cut out, its extremely hard to get even a small part of the pie. Linux desktop was too late, Windows Phone was too late. Why? Apps/ecosystem. I mean, Windows to this date still barely has a way to update software like Linux had for more than 20 years (APT, for example). You need either Windows Store or a third party one such as Chocolatey or Scoop.
Google did the same thing until the EU forced it not to. It wouldn’t allow a manufacturer to sell both a Google certified Android phone and an open source AOSP phone without Google Services.
I’m glad I’m not alone in feeling that. I watched what happened, literally competed against them in the 90’s. Recently I’ve been thinking they’d changed a lot, Edge on non-windows, Linux friendliness in windows 10 and azure, etc.. even kicking around the idea of picking up a windows lapper to kick the tires on. I got chills by this. I don’t think I’ll be getting that laptop for a while.
It’s a winner takes all world because that’s how they played the game and they made it that way. We actually had quite a bit of plurality before Windows, the UNIX world put in a tremendous amount of effort to have open standards so you could reasonably build software for multiple platforms. Sun built Java for that world. The industry seemed remarkably open to multiple platforms, which isn’t without problems either, but I think I might like it if we had a few more serious mobile players
I should have clarified that to be Chromebook and Android.
End of the day, the Microsoft ecosystem just dominated client tech utterly. The previous king of mobile, Blackberry, was basically a hardware version of Microsoft Outlook.
They had tablets and phones years ago, but chose to position them as shitty PCs instead of real devices. Internet Explorer for Windows CE was a steaming pile of shit that has it been something better would have changed many things.
Today Microsoft is in trouble and is running on inertia. In many ways Apple owns higher ed. Google completely dominates K-12. The Windows 10 strategy is designed to make IT people in enterprises fail.
Google bought Android and was converting it into a phone OS years before iPhone was announced [0].
While the original hardware looks more like a Blackberry, and was definitely influenced by the iPhone afterwards, it's also wrong to say we wouldn't have gotten Android without the iPhone.
Surely they would have just gone with the original KHTML or some Gecko-based thing instead. I don't think we wouldn't have Chrome, just that it may look different.
That is strange, but what is most disturbing is how he is utterly certain that Microsoft deserved to have that market, that it would be better if Microsoft dominated that market as well, and that Microsoft missed out on that market because of high-level managerial errors, not because people didn't like Windows phone.