Bill Gates Shares His 'Greatest Mistake Ever' (inc.com) 269
Bill Gates "clearly hasn't got over his biggest mistake," writes Inc. columnist Chris Matyszczyk.
Speaking at a recent VC firm event, Gates told the audience: The greatest mistake ever is... whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is. That is, Android is the standard phone platform -- non-Apple form -- phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win...
There's room for exactly one non-Apple operating system, and what's that worth? $400 billion that would be transferred from company G to company M.
"You see? He couldn't even utter the word Google," quips Inc's columnist. "That's how much it hurts him."
The column also notes that Google "didn't create Android. It bought it in 2005," and "being open-source meant that Google could offer it to so many phone manufacturers around the world.... Would Microsoft have been so generous of spirit?"
Speaking at a recent VC firm event, Gates told the audience: The greatest mistake ever is... whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is. That is, Android is the standard phone platform -- non-Apple form -- phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win...
There's room for exactly one non-Apple operating system, and what's that worth? $400 billion that would be transferred from company G to company M.
"You see? He couldn't even utter the word Google," quips Inc's columnist. "That's how much it hurts him."
The column also notes that Google "didn't create Android. It bought it in 2005," and "being open-source meant that Google could offer it to so many phone manufacturers around the world.... Would Microsoft have been so generous of spirit?"
Dick not waved high and fast enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh noes! My company could have dominated the world even more, and I could have been even wealthier! What a tragedy, I will forever hang my head in shame.
Re:Dick not waved high and fast enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh noes! My company could have dominated the world even more, and I could have been even wealthier! What a tragedy, I will forever hang my head in shame.
But it's pretty fascinating in hindsight.
Microsoft dominated the desktop and laptop market, Google was a search engine, and Blackberry was stuck on an outdated interface design.
And the first generation of smartphones were pretty much just Blackberry and Microsoft.
The fact that Apple and Android became the smartphone market is kinda shocking.
I think that Microsoft just missed the boat on aesthetics and reputation. With Windows that doesn't matter because there's so many functionality constraints when looking at desktop OS that people don't have much choice, so MS didn't realize just how many of its customers didn't really like their brand.
But when it comes to phones you have a lot more choice, and when people realized they could go non-MS they generally did.
Re:Dick not waved high and fast enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dick not waved high and fast enough (Score:5, Insightful)
It is more simple than that. With desktops, Microsoft had a monopoly handed over to them by IBM. With smartphones they had to actually compete for the better software and the better solution.
Partially, but they still beat out Apple and a number of other competitors for the desktop market.
Apple became the early winner partly by getting into schools, so when the kids grew up they would buy the computers they knew.
Microsoft's big win was getting into businesses, not only did that get them to the real money but it started giving them an application ecosystem, which turned out to be the killer app for home computers.
I think they tried to do the same with the Window's Phone, but it didn't play out the same way. The only business-critical phone apps are email and calendar notifications, and everybody had those. So businesses didn't need Window's Phones and even if they bought them the employee's could still buy the phones they wanted, ie iPhones and Androids.
tone deaf (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft was running radio commercials at the time warning business people not to walk into traffic because of how awesome reading Excel spreadsheets on your phone would be.
Yeah, they didn't get it.
Microsofts 3 Failures: (Score:2, Interesting)
Windows CE, Lack of a VM, Lack of backwards compatibility.
Windows Phone was basically a carryon of the mistakes made in Windows CE.
You need application compatibility across OS Versions, at least moving forward (backward when an app can fit is nice too!) Microsoft consistently failed at creating an API/ABI like that on Windows CE and later Windows Phone. Combined with Native Applications tied to a single architecture, and ARM's variety of api and abi incompatible versions at that time, it failed to penetrate
Re: (Score:3)
The lack of compatibility was also made worse by the "windows" branding, which made customers expect compatibility with their desktop systems. Many users expected this, and were severely disappointed.
Apple ensured the iphone had its own branding distinct from their mac laptops, so users didn't expect them to be compatible.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dick not waved high and fast enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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It wasn't just the high-end market, the iPod Shuffle was selling for $55 CAD by 2008. Not super cheap, but not exactly high-end. Apple had iPods in pretty much all the market segments.
Re:Dick not waved high and fast enough (Score:5, Interesting)
https://www.inc.com/chris-haro... [inc.com]
All of those examples you list are an example of people being "Short-Term Greedy". Exactly like you said, 9 times out of 10 it results in NO money, but people keep chasing it because of that ONE time it worked for someone.
What does being "Long-Term Greedy" entail? Just don't be an a****le. Be professional, do the right thing for no reason all the time. Not because it makes you money now, but because it makes you money in the future.
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It is more simple than that. With desktops, Microsoft had a monopoly handed over to them by IBM. With smartphones they had to actually compete for the better software and the better solution.
Very Simple actually with desktops it was initially a companies money not your own. Who cares if the company wastes money on crap computers also the IT dept needs something to do so the worse the machine the more work and bigger they get. But with a personal phone it was your money even in companies where they buy you a phone you often have a choice to "upgrade" to one of your choice when its your money you tend to spend it more wisely so you choose the better product.
Note Better product refers to overall
Re:Dick not waved high and fast enough (Score:4, Insightful)
MS never got it. Ever.
Every time there was a new version, that was supposedly THE version that was going to be lightweight, for mobile devices (and far, far later Phones), it was always a reskinned Windows CE type thing.
First time I held a PalmPilot and started using it, it felt right. The task buttons helped, sure, but it was the
But every single time. "it's got to be a near full windows because that's what our users really want, with the ability to run a full version of word and excel and powerpoint etc."
And as said, no-way would MS have given away Windows Mobile to people, heck, they'd have insisted on WinMobile+WinMobileOffice most likely.
Summary here would be better without the quip (Score:2, Insightful)
The "how much it hurt him" quip is just embarrassing. No need to repeat it.
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No, I mean the journalist who wrote that tabloid nonsense.
It's not a mystery... (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason that MS didn't get the cell phone OS market is that they tried to extract every penny in licensing fees, including huge implementation costs, and in contrast Android was free and open source, making it extremely easy for telco engineers to implement and for the businesses to do the deal. On top of that, Telco's were looking at MS dominating the desktop market, squeezing all the money out so most PC manufacturers made nothing, and really didn't want to let MS dominate the cell phone industry. Google was smart enough to not try to extract the money and control up front, putting them in position to win strategically.
It also didn't help that WinCE was a terrible OS - a confused copy of PalmOS built out of Windows, which was slow and buggy.
So there was no technical or business reason any phone company would want to use it, unless they'd utterly failed everything else first.
You'll note that MS also utterly failed in the cable set top box business, for the same set of reasons.
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So there was no technical or business reason any phone company would want to use it,
WindowsPhone had roughly 17% of the Smartphone market at the time Microsoft killed it (in favor of Windows Phone). The primary salespoint at that time was it could run Microsoft Office.
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The reason that MS didn't get the cell phone OS market is that they tried to extract every penny in licensing fees
Mod this parent up. People had got locked into MS for the desktop but for once they learned a lesson from it. By the time smartphones came along they were tired of the shit that MS was throwing at its customers.
Not free at all (Score:2)
Android never was free. The difference is who Microsoft tried to collect money from vs. Google... Microsoft stupidly tried to get money up front, Google was smart enough to know that user data was worth so much more than up-front licensing could ever be...
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Exactly my point - Google gave up fees from phone manufacturers because they were smart enough to see that the real money was in having the market share that let them create new revenue streams. That's how Google is wired - give products away and make a fortune via the ecosystem that you create, which is how search, docs, Android, etc., all make money. MS doesn't think that way, which is how they missed cell phones (WinCE/Windows Phone/etc.), the internet (Blackbird), etc. The only big success for them in a
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I personally preferred Windows Mobile to the early Android. But it didn't work well with capacitive touchscreens and Apple made these fashionable.
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Actually, Google paid for phone manufacturers to use Android, albeit indirectly. For example, they would give carriers part of the search revenue for searches made on the phone, so carriers insisted that phone manufacturers use Android (and of course make Google the default search engine) to prop up their revenue.
Another reason Windows on phones failed (after a decent start by the way) - Ballmer was running the show as Gates was stepping away around that time. Ballmer's stupid heavy handed top level decisio
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"Google was smart enough to not try to extract the money and control up front, putting them in position to win strategically."
Unlike Google with Android, Microsoft simply was not in a position to monetize WinCE by making it a ad-serving, data-gathering "freeware"
Can’t see it (Score:5, Insightful)
I don’t see Ballmer’s Microsoft giving anything away for free. Certainly not in 2005. So it’s hard to see how Microsoft could’ve done what Google did with Android.
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You got it backwards. Google won the internet by taking stuff that's free.
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But it's still free. Microsoft still could (and Huawei just might have to) build an Android-compatible OS from the same source code that Android's built from. Yes, it's not practical to do - because so many of the apps are tied to Google stuff in the Play services. But it's only not practical because Android exists for free too. That's why Microsoft hasn't tried to foist Microsoft Android on the world - the world doesn't need or want it.
But once you're in Huawei's shoes, practicality is only half the st
"Generous" (Score:3)
An advertising business model that sells information about you isn't "generous". It's just another business model.
Microsoft wouldn't have been trusted by phone makers if they had offered that deal. If phone makers could go back in time, they probably wouldn't trust a Google either.
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If phone makers could go back in time, they probably wouldn't trust a Google either
Not if they're serious. Assuming they only get one time trip, they'd send an assassin to take out Linus's mom and pay off the jury in USL vs BSDi. [wikipedia.org]
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For the umpteenth + 1 time, Google does not sell information about you. No, they're anything but generous, and they're getting to be an unfair competitor too. But they don't sell your information. They hoard it jealously and use it to sell advertisers your attention. That's a different thing - and you may hate it as well. Just don't misrepresent it.
Facebook, on the other hand, does everything Google does - plus they sell your information (or at least used to until very recently).
Sure, Google didn't create Android. (Score:5, Insightful)
But then, Microsoft didn't event DOS. It went out and found what it needed, which was a workable CP/M knock-off. That's much easier when you don't already have products to protect that *might* play in that space.
There was no technical reason Windows CE couldn't have been Android. There are considerable marketing reasons why it was never very likely to. Android makes it very easy to create a modern looking mobile app in a language (Java) that enjoys considerable brain share, The same stuff could have been built up on top of Windows CE, but they wouldn't be leveraging the position they already had. They'd be destroying it in order to enjoy an even better one.
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Brilliant point. MS jammed a ton of unneeded Windows code into WinCE, bloating it up and making it impossible to run on cheap, low-power processors. I recall back in the day getting in fights with the product manager of WinCE about this point - he was absolutely convinced that WinCE's strongest strategic advantage was the Windows API, as if anyone would run Windows desktop apps on their phone, with the high cost and terrible battery life that implied.
Google did "create" Android (Score:2)
The OS world is dime a dozen with OSes coming out of our ears from people who programmed them. But to "create" the system now seen as Android is definitely a product of Google, not the least of which is the App integration.
It's not worth pointing out that Android as a software was bought by Google in 2005, because if Microsoft bought it instead it would have been dead in the water.
Bill doesn't understand (Score:5, Interesting)
Bill still doesn't understand that his biggest mistake ever was blatantly lacking any moral compass, so that nobody trusted Microsoft enough to let them own the phone system. Not to say Ma Bell, smartass Google or thug Apple are fundamentally more deserving of that monopoly, just that Bill firmly positioned Microsoft right of the bottom of that barrel of sludge.
Re: (Score:2)
Nasty troll post that, typical of a delusional self important Microsoft employee. I expect you must go completely unnoticed there.
This goes back to PDAs (Score:5, Informative)
Then Microsoft dropped the ball. It was obvious to most that PDAs and cell phones were going to merge. Both were devices with buttons and a screen that you carried in your pocket all day. If you used both, you were constantly reminded of this fact as they bumped together in your pocket. The only question was whether PDAs would pick up cell phone capability, or cell phones would pick up PDA capability. Blackberry (Research in Motion) was the first to tap this demand. They had a line of pagers with keyboards. In 2002 they came out with a pager/phone with keyboard [wikipedia.org] and rudimentary PDA capability. It rapidly took over the market in the U.S. Nokia (with Symbian OS) did the same to their phones in the rest of the world. These were the first true smartphones - cell phones with general purpose processors and OSes capable of running generic programs (including PDA software) that could be developed independently (didn't have to be provided by the phone manufacturer).
Meanwhile, HP and a couple others using WinCE tried to add cell phone capability to their PDAs [wikipedia.org], but were hampered because Microsoft offered zero support for this effort. Adding phone capability requires direct access to phone hardware, which WinCE wasn't capable of providing at the time. So these companies had to build hardware and software kludges to get everything to work. If Microsoft had bothered to lift a finger to help with this effort, they could've taken over the smartphone market before Blackberry and Nokia did (and the only distinctive thing about the iPhone would've been the lack of a physical keyboard). My guess is the managers at Microsoft calling the shots all had personal assistants who followed them everywhere and handled their calls and schedules. So they were never annoyed by having a phone and PDA bump against each other in their pockets, and didn't realize the two devices were going to converge.
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Palm initially owned the PDA market, but refused to license their OS. Microsoft offered an alternative OS, and by 2000 had successfully vanquished Palm with WinCE (which went through a variety of name changes too numerous to list [wikipedia.org]). And by the early 2000s, the vast majority of PDAs were on Microsoft's OS instead of Palm's.
Then Microsoft dropped the ball. It was obvious to most that PDAs and cell phones were going to merge. Both were devices with buttons and a screen that you carried in your pocket all day. If you used both, you were constantly reminded of this fact as they bumped together in your pocket. The only question was whether PDAs would pick up cell phone capability, or cell phones would pick up PDA capability. Blackberry (Research in Motion) was the first to tap this demand. They had a line of pagers with keyboards. In 2002 they came out with a pager/phone with keyboard [wikipedia.org] and rudimentary PDA capability. It rapidly took over the market in the U.S. Nokia (with Symbian OS) did the same to their phones in the rest of the world. These were the first true smartphones - cell phones with general purpose processors and OSes capable of running generic programs (including PDA software) that could be developed independently (didn't have to be provided by the phone manufacturer).
Meanwhile, HP and a couple others using WinCE tried to add cell phone capability to their PDAs [wikipedia.org], but were hampered because Microsoft offered zero support for this effort. Adding phone capability requires direct access to phone hardware, which WinCE wasn't capable of providing at the time. So these companies had to build hardware and software kludges to get everything to work. If Microsoft had bothered to lift a finger to help with this effort, they could've taken over the smartphone market before Blackberry and Nokia did (and the only distinctive thing about the iPhone would've been the lack of a physical keyboard). My guess is the managers at Microsoft calling the shots all had personal assistants who followed them everywhere and handled their calls and schedules. So they were never annoyed by having a phone and PDA bump against each other in their pockets, and didn't realize the two devices were going to converge.
Palm did license their OS. Remember PalmSource and PalmOne? There were Sony Clie's, Handspring's original Treo which was a groundbreaking smartphone, Tapwave's Gameboy like Zodiac, and many others.
Palm failed because they were resting on their laurels. Palm OS 6 was a nightmare for some reason so PalmOne just kept rehashing Palm OS 5 which was so long in the tooth, it was a joke. Blackberry again was coasting on everything. Microsoft was just Microsoft. There's a really painful article somewhere where the p
Call me crazy, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
If Android had never existed, Microsoft would have about the same market share in cell phones that they do now. It's Apple that lost out, not Microsoft.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you're wrong there. Microsoft was playing by their standard strategy - keep your feet wet, watch the market to see what develops and then leverage the Windows monopoly to instantly take second place. Finally, count on OEM's to boost you up to first place.
What they missed wasn't Android as an OS - it was Google using Microsoft's strategy to usurp Microsoft's natural #2 position. From there, they rode to #1 on the backs of OEM's just like Microsoft would have had Google not gotten there first.
Re: (Score:2)
And in place of "leverage the Windows monopoly", Google used "leverage the popularity of Java and the enthusiasm of the Open Source movement".
None of this would have been possible had Internet Explorer remained the 'one standard internet browser that mattered'. Part of Apple's success with the iPhone was their own leveraging of the Open Source community - by taking KHTML from the KDE folks and turning it into Safari. An iPhone dependent on a Microsoft browser would've been easy to control. Anyway, the su
Re:Call me crazy, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Steve Jobs wasn't going to license iOS to anyone else. And the whole array of hardware makers and carriers who saw what happened in PCs weren't going to let Apple be the phone-Microsoft any more than they were going to let Microsoft be the phone-Microsoft.
The third ecosystem could have happened (Score:4, Interesting)
There's room for exactly one non-Apple operating system
That's nonsense. Around the time when WP came out, the fabled "third ecosystem" could have happened, and in fact seemed very likely. It would take a major company that is not universally hated and distrusted - that would be Nokia minus Elop - eager to push a system that is not trash - that would be MeeGo.
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I've heard this argument before, but do people really care about having a full office suite on their phones? It seems so inconvenient to use, compared to carrying a small laptop if you're the sort of person who need that sort of thing.
Re: The third ecosystem could have happened (Score:2)
Gates allowed Google to launch Android? (Score:3)
Microsoft could have owned mobile space back in 2004 with the TRON [wikipedia.org] real time operating system. Instead of which Gates partnered with the T-Engine Forum [linuxinsider.com] after having the OS banned in North America.
Microsoft (Score:2)
Windows CE, Windows Pen libraries and all kinds of tablet/phone functionality far pre-date Android.
The reason it didn't take off was entirely Microsoft - they had the edge for years, even a version of Windows (XP?) for tablets. It was just crap and proprietary.
Even Java was around before Android, they could have basically done the same, but no, WinCE was proprietary, obscure and yet-another-platform.
Buying Nokia was about 20 years too late. Every Microsoft phone, even today, is utter shit.
It's not whateve
I think his biggest mistake is... (Score:2)
Windows CE is the greatest mistake (Score:2)
along with the great internet explorer stagnation.
Smart phones were dominated by Microsoft who did what they always do, which is stagnate without competition. The thing is that Windows CE was 'okay' on embedded machines with less than 16mb of ram and 32MB of storage. But times changed, and suddenly those embedded CPU's had clocks over 1Ghz and memories in the hundreds of megabytes, and storage in gigabytes! Apple showed the world in 2007 that you could run a full UNIX on a phone. And all Microsoft had w
Stop being Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, there wasn't just one error, there was an entire multi-year legacy of disaster that combined. But for a few highlights:
1) Everybody making phones knew what happened to PC makers; they had become thin-margin commodity assemblers who put high-margin Intel chips and high-margin Microsoft operating systems in boxes. None of them wanted to become the new clonemakers, mating Qualcomm chips to an MS OS at thin margins. If there was a viable alternative to Microsoft, they were going to use it.
2) The US market for phones was and is is largely dominated by what the phone carriers are willing to sell to their subscribers. Nobody at the phone companies wanted to pay Microsoft money in order to become the next IBM, begging for Microsoft's goodwill on the eve of the release of Windows 95. If there was a viable alternative to Microsoft, they were going to use it.
3) In November 2007, everybody saw Microsoft screw over all the makers of non-Apple portable music players and all the non-Apple sellers of digital music when Microsoft threw over the whole PlaysForSure ecosystem in the launch of the incompatible Microsoft-brand Zune music player and its music service. Everybody was put on notice that Microsoft was not going to stand behind its platforms and the partners who invested in them.
That's why the main platform in competition with Apple was going to be an alternative to Microsoft. Preferably something open-source enough that it would be practical to break with its vendor, but in any case vended by someone other than Microsoft.
But, you know, that wasn't the end of Microsoft's mistakes. When, in the last gasp chance for Microsoft to salvage a role as the "third platform", Microsoft released Windows Phone, they broke compatibility with Windows Mobile, completely screwing over everybody who had ever invested anything in Microsoft handheld application development.
Re: Stop being Microsoft? (Score:3)
Spot on! I was a very successful pocket pc developer and was ready to fully support windows phone until I learned it meant rewriting my entire codebase for a tiny drastically changing market. Nearly every developer I talked to felt the same way. Whoever decided to not support C/C++ out of the gates, pun intended, is what killed Windows Phone without them even knowing it. Morons. By the time they finally added it the die was cast and it was entirely too late. I considered porting at that time but the w
Thanks to Clinton's DOJ (Score:2)
If MS had won their monopoly trials, they would have blocked blackberry, Android and iOS from Windows compatibility before they ever had a chance to make an impact on the market.
For that matter, that would have blocked the entire internet as we know it and the only functional internet service would be MSN.
Not For A Lack Of Trying (Score:2)
Windows Phone was released as its own thing, trying to shoehorn a "tiles" theme from Windows 8 and Surface to a community that didn't want large rectangles of crap on their small screens.
I think they should have taken Windows CE and added phone cap
Interesting how everyone has an opinion about why (Score:4, Interesting)
Bill Gates himself doesn't have an explanation on why he didn't succeed: "whatever mismanagement I engaged" is the best he could come up with.
Bill Gates, possibly the most successful tech entrepreneur ever doesn't know why his own company failed. And that's in hindsight. And it's not like he tries to shift the blame on others too, he clearly takes responsibility.
That it to say, if Bill Gates doesn't know, no one will. And it is evident by the wild speculations: is it because of open source, Microsoft's reputation at that time, licensing, integration of cell phone features, etc... ?
Interesting how Microsoft lost a $400 billion market and no one really knows why. Usually big successes or failures can be attributed to a cause. Success can, for example, be tied to a particularly effective marketing campaign, and failure can be the result of targeting the wrong market. But here, there is no clear cause.
Re: (Score:2)
Nah, he's just stupid...
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
It is often the case that people on the inside of a story cannot or won't see aspects of a story that are obvious to outsiders. They themselves as subjects are too subjective, whereas the outside perspective looking at them as objects can be more objective. I'm not going to expound on the causes since that would make this post redundant with almost all the other posts in the thread, but I did think a reminder was in order, that Gates not knowing / claiming not to know the reason doesn't mean no reason exist
MS couldn't have done android (Score:2)
At the time Windows Mobile was the other dominant platform (the other being Blackberry, and maybe Symbian). And back in those days Microsoft was a serious NIH company - leveraging Windows (Windows Everywhere) was the thing to do.
Microsoft not buying Android wasn't a mistake; why would they when WinMo was everywhere? It was actually pretty successful, using the metrics of the time.
What Ballmer didn't see was that Mobile was going to be king. That's because Ballmer was Microsoft's Tim Cook; why would you expe
Sour taste (Score:2)
They were handed the desktop market by IBM... The hardware design was open that it gave people choice, the software was a cheap component and DOS also had multiple vendors available. By the time people realised microsoft were locking them in it was too late, so now while they have a lot of customers many of them are reluctantly forced to use microsoft products. Their products also have a reputation for being lacklustre, poor security, poor reliability etc.
So you take this to the mobile market, where microso
How is this Gates' mistake anyway? (Score:3)
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Android may "sucks" and Bill Gates may "sucks" in your opinion... but fact remains, he's still right. The market settled on two, and he lost.
Re:Nope, bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
And the market for smartphones is much better for it.
Re:Nope, bullshit. (Score:4, Interesting)
How so? The smartphone market is a duopoly between iPhone and Android, two miserable platforms controlled by two of the worst tech companies out there. It's bad enough that if Microsoft was still in the market, I'd have a Windows phone. And I don't like Microsoft either.
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How so? The smartphone market is a duopoly between iPhone and Android, two miserable platforms controlled by two of the worst tech companies out there. It's bad enough that if Microsoft was still in the market, I'd have a Windows phone. And I don't like Microsoft either.
I'm curious now. Which tech companies do you think would get your approval?
Re:Nope, bullshit. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not clear that Microsoft _could_ have dominated in the cell phone market, even if they'd chosen to enter it earlier. For example, Microsoft has a long history of adopting or stealing technologies from other companies, such as the VMS kernel they stole, along with hiring key developers, from DEC to build Windows NT. They're not well known for creating technologies from scratch, and the cell phone economy was quite new. Could the leadership of Microsoft, or Bill Gates, have made the right decisions with a new field?
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For example, Microsoft has a long history of adopting or stealing technologies from other companies, such as the VMS kernel they stole, along with hiring key developers, from DEC to build Windows NT. They're not well known for creating technologies from scratch, and the cell phone economy was quite new. Could the leadership of Microsoft, or Bill Gates, have made the right decisions with a new field?
They could have stolen Android before Google got it.
Re:Nope, bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
They could have stolen Android before Google got it.
Haha, yes they could have. But remember, Linux was "cancer" at the time.
Re:Nope, bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft was in the market for years before Apple or Google. I had a Windows Mobile phone way before either Apple or Google were in the game .. in fact it was Blackberry that was the top dog at the time.Microsoft was in the game and the fumbled the ball. That's about it. I'd blame Gates and co for not being as open source friendly at the time. They wanted everyone to be all Microsoft, all the time. It failed for them. They also produced at craptastic interface for their mobile offerings that just didn't get it for most folks.
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No, I have to disagree.
MS shot itself in the foot in smartphones by doing one thing: Completley ditching one thing and re-inventing the wheel, with often no support for previous app designs. I mean, that you'd have a windows phone 8 app, and you were completley fucked if that was going to work on 10.
People got fucked off with microsoft continually fucking them over and dropping support for things in mobile. Like, literally dropped. gone. ended. rewrite ahoy.
All this got bought to a head when astoria got
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Another EPIC fuck-up that utterly destroyed any goodwill that remained among the group that historically was Microsoft's #1 market for high-end smartphones: arbitrarily deciding to NOT allow people who'd purchased a HTC Touch HD2 to upgrade to Windows Phone, for no reason besides Microsoft's opinion that it had "too many" silkscreened buttons compared to the three Microsoft officially deemed acceptable for Windows Phone.
Microsoft's announcement INFURIATED people who'd purchased what was, just weeks earlier,
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If you will recall, Microsoft was the first to build a serious smartphone product and did dominate the early smartphone market. The problem was, Windows as an OS and Windows as an API both sucked way too much in that form factor, so the market never took off, even with all Microsoft's usual slimeball strongarm tactics. Microsoft's only real accomplishment in that space was to make people understand the difference between a clunky force fit of a product and one suited to purpose.
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More precisely, the WIndows CE interface that was then used was totally picked from the desktop Windows 98, and very unsuitable for a phone. It was only after Windows 8 that Microsoft had gotten it right, but by then, both Android and iPhones had established their markets.
Microsoft would have done well by making the Windows 8 desktop the same as Windows 7, but w/ the new kernel. With the option for the Metro UI if a touchscreen was present. In the meantime, the Windows 8 Phone should have had a comple
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It's nothing less than startling how dense Microsoft and its minions were, when they failed to realize that a native OS works much better than that abortive thing they made, even on small computers. Which of course were no longer small by the time smartphones seriously became a thing, but even if they were, Wince (sic) was just a suck ass bad idea, beaten to death for an incredibly long time before they finally got it through their pustulent monopoly rotted skulls that they lost the market, big time.
Re:Nope, bullshit. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not clear that Microsoft _could_ have dominated in the cell phone market, even if they'd chosen to enter it earlier. For example, Microsoft has a long history of adopting or stealing technologies from other companies, such as the VMS kernel they stole, along with hiring key developers, from DEC to build Windows NT. They're not well known for creating technologies from scratch, and the cell phone economy was quite new. Could the leadership of Microsoft, or Bill Gates, have made the right decisions with a new field?
That's nonsense. Microsoft had a horse in this race well before smartphones were even a thing. The problem is that Microsoft's products in this space were crap. Ever tried to program for WinCE? It's an alien, non-standard developmetn platform that is compatible with exactly nothing else on earth.
It's a bloody good thing that Android "won" - a decent OS for embedded consumer devices was desired by developers and MS kept pushing the "I'm incompatible with everything" WinCE. If Android had not come around we'd still be without decent smart TVs, smart home automation controllers, smart credit card terminals, etc... because all those devices would be running WinCE and no one would be buying enough of them to make the economies of scale work.
WinCE is so crap, that the market literally waited for the first thing that was better (Linux, then Android) before anyone wanted them. WinCE by itself delayed the creation of the smart embedded market, that's how crap it is.
(I've had to work with it exactly once in the past - never again!
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Nope, bullshit. (Score:5, Informative)
Umm... there's a good reason why Microsoft gets a fairly hefty royalty from the sale of most Android phones, and it's not just because of FAT. Windows Mobile might have been butt-ugly and severely constrained by the hardware available to run it on, but at its core, it was a very good OS. Microsoft's BIGGEST fuck-up was abandoning Windows Mobile for "Windows Phone", then attempting to cripple desktop Windows for the sake of bringing it down to phone/tablet level.
In terms of fundamental OS capabilities, Android didn't achieve functional parity with Windows Mobile 6 until sometime around Gingerbread... almost three years after Android became generally available to consumers.
Yes, nearly everyone who was in the "Windows Mobile" camp jumped ship to Android in 2009-2010... and if Microsoft had gone through with Windows Mobile 7 (instead of the dysfunctional clusterfuck abortion that "Windows Phone" ended up being), I'd say that probably 50-70% of former Windows-Mobile users who had a romantic affair with Android between 2010-2012 would have gone back to Windows Mobile in 2013 or 2014... especially after Google started tightening the screws on microSD card storage and manufacturers started locking down bootloaders. And even MORESO if Microsoft made a deal with vendors like they did with Chinese tablet manufacturers that allowed them to ship a generation of dual-boot Windows/Android devices, because it would have allowed those same consumers to do direct side-by-side comparisons of Android and Windows Mobile running on identical hardware.
The harsh truth is that Windows Mobile might not have been "free" or "open source", but from the standpoint of phone owners and developers, it was probably MORE open than Android ultimately ended up being once Google started turning the screws. With Windows CE/Windows Mobile, adding a device driver for vendor-unsupported hardware was no harder than it was for Windows. With Android, adding loadable kernel modules for vendor-unsupported hardware is damn-near IMPOSSIBLE without throwing the baby out with the bathwater and rebuilding the phone's entire kernel and runtime environment from scratch & sacrificing a chunk of the features that probably motivated you to buy that particular phone in the first place.
This is particularly relevant in two realms: bluetooth and camera. Specifically, Android phones almost NEVER provide complete bluetooth stacks... and building a custom AOSP-derived Android ROM for the sake of replacing its bluetooth stack almost always results in a phone with a camera that's at least slightly crippled compared to the features it has with a stock ROM.
As far as I know, there has NEVER, in the entire history of Android phones, been a device (not even Nexus) where the manufacturer released not only the source, but the build files as well, necessary to replicate the phone's stock factory ROM so you could using it as a STARTING POINT. The only option has EVER been to completely start over from scratch with AOSP, which never fully and completely supports 100% of the phone's original features.
Windows Mobile/CE obviously didn't allow end users to rebuild the kernel... but you could hack just about everything in the phone at least as easily as you can today with Android. Often, MORE easily, due to Android's restrictions on user-enabled loadable kernel modules.
Hell, XDA-Developers STARTED OUT as a site for people hacking Windows Mobile phones, and mutated into an Android site simply because "everyone" who formerly was an active user ran to the Android camp after Microsoft killed Windows Mobile and Android appeared. Back in the early days of Android, we naively believed that in another year or two, we'd live in a happy world where "Android Linux" was just like desktop Linux... you'd be able to go to HTC or Samsung's website, download the source and buildfiles, and end up with a fully-working ROM/distro that was identical to the one that shipped with the phone... then tweak it from there. Instead, we ended up in a dystopian hell universe
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Windows Mobile became a good OS once they changed the core from WinCE for WP7 to NT 6.1 for WP8. The mistake they did was, as you point out, crippling the desktop Windows 7 - which is to this day considered by many as the best Windows OS to date - to merge the codebase w/ the phone/tablet.
Instead, they could have let those 2 independently develop, and then developed 2 tablets: one a desktop compatible tablet like the Surface, which can be used as a lighter laptop and integrated w/ corporate servers and d
Re:Nope, bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's BIGGEST fuck-up was abandoning Windows Mobile for "Windows Phone"
I disagree. I think their biggest fuck-up was that they believed anyone would want anything resembling Windows on their phone to begin with. Only the feeble-minded management team of Gates and Balmer (especially Balmer) could have believed Windows was the panacea that it clearly was not.
Also, there's this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Balmer fundamentally didn't understand, at that moment, that the iPhone was literally about to put him out of a job.
Re: (Score:2)
1000hz touchscreen sampling?
Why would you want that?
Re: Nope, bullshit. (Score:2)
> Why would you want that?
I use Graffiti. Higher sample rate == better accuracy. The worst Android devices I ever owned were the Motorola Xoom & Photon. Their touchscreen sample rate was 20hz, and accuracy was SO BAD I actually endured a year with a conventional Swype-type keyboard because Graffiti was basically unusable.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
1000Hz == 1KHz
That said, you really DO need close to a 1000hz sample rate and output framerate to track a stylus and render output at its tip with zero visible lag, unless you can deterministically read the stylus AND update the framebuffer during the final fraction of a millisecond before the frame gets output to the display. 1000hz gives you the luxury of being able to read the stylus now, and update the display in time for the NEXT frame.
With finger tracking, it's much worse, because the very definition
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He's totally wrong, and he still doesn't get it.
Android is not an OS. It is an app sandbox for linux.
If it was true, as he believes, that there is only room for one non-Apple OS, then Android wouldn't exist and MS might have won that battle. He can't understand his loss, because he is still wearing the same blinders that caused the loss.
Linux does not need your concept of success to exist. It has its own idea of success, and it doesn't involve market share or money. If he could get his head around this idea
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The market settled on two, and he lost.
From an API point of view, the market settled on just one: Unix. Bad luck for win32, coulda been a contender if not for being utter stinking crap.
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"There's room for exactly one non-Apple operating system" - Bullshit. Android sucks. Bill Gates sucks.
Dunno why this was modded down: it's true, particularly the part about Android.
I do disagree w/ Gates about one thing: his greatest mistake was not grabbing the RISC opportunity he got to go full 64-bit before it became a fad. When Windows NT was new, aside from the Pentium, it existed on 2 64-bit platforms: MIPS and Alpha. He should have made the RISC version of NT 64-bit, so that Microsoft could have developed and run 64-bit software long before AMD got to the party. It would have made the CPU market
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The code for NT 3/4 was not suitable for compilation on a 64bit platform... On MIPS it ran in 32bit mode, while on Alpha it used a compatibility mode provided by the compiler to simulate a 32bit system. The code made assumptions that pointers were all 32 bits etc, which would cause a crash when compiled on a 64bit host.
It wasn't until post-2000 that they fixed up the code to handle a 64bit system, there were some internal builds of windows 2000 in 64bit mode on the alpha but they were never released publicl
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Microsoft could have managed it if they just had implemented as much as possible of the API that was in the documentation. I coded for Windows Mobile 6.1 and it was a headache because there were many API calls, but not everyone of them were implemented rendering the phones quite lobotimized.
No wonder people weren't producing the amount of apps that would have made it a competitor on the market.
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Armpits Ballmer was never more than Billg's puppet, pogo dancing on his string.
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Did I hear somebody slithering nearby?
Re:640KB enough for anybody (Score:4, Insightful)
640KB enough for anybody
Gates claims he never said that and I believe him. People who believe he was the one who decided on the 640k limit are over-estimating his influence on early PC architecture - there are Gates admirers who believe he invented the PC and therefore designed its architecture. All Gates did back then was sell IBM a crappy operating system that he had bought at a knock-off price from elsewhere. He did write BASIC for the PC, but he was really not that important at the time, like he is no longer relevant now.
Re:640KB enough for anybody (Score:4, Insightful)
I have the audio where he says at a user's group meeting (although it
wasn't those exact words, but yeah, that idea is definitely stated by him).
Many like to make fun of the remark, you have to remember the times -
640k cost *a lot* of money back then; windows didn't exist and digital anything
was a big pie-in-the-sky. I look at other goofy predictions made by others
at the time which were silly in hindsight and nobody brings those up.
CAP === 'comments'
Re:640KB enough for anybody (Score:5, Insightful)
If the audio is available then post it and link to it. Given that it has been so widely quoted and refuted by Bill Gates, then it seems strange that the audio hasn't been heard by everybody.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> He did write BASIC for the PC
Not really, no. He did, along with Paul and Monty, _implement_ a BASIC interpreter for the Altos. It has been alleged that this was based on a public domain BASIC that ran on the DEC machines that he used at Harvard. All 8080 development at the time was done using cross compilers on DEC machines (until CP/M came along). The languages were similar enough but the maths parts had to be completely redone to account for the architectural differences and this is what Monty did.
Bi
Psst Microsoft, you could still take over... (Score:2, Interesting)
Google seemingly has the market owned, but really all Google has is a market soon to be powned. Nobody's phone gets regular software and firmware updates beyond a token one or two iterations that the manufacturer sees fit to release because they are still selling that version of hardware. After that, you're SOL.
This is a highly dangerous and unstable situation because as soon as the first serious randsomware worm hits the Android ecosystem, the entire population is going to be screaming bloody murder. Just
Re:640KB enough for anybody (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Rewriting history (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft was on v6 of their mobile OS when Android came out. It was the #3 OS (behind blackberry and Symbian). Its not that they weren't in the market, its that the all touch phone combined with cheapening data access turned mobile from a side business to a major business, and MS wasn't in position to make that change- they were more focused on compatibility with desktop windows than creating a great mobile OS.
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And Microsoft was nowhere near mobile because they thought, like most, that Blackberry had cornered the market.
No. MS was right behind Blackberry from what I remember with Windows Mobile. But like Blackberry, they didn't change fast enough with the market. And MS tried with Windows Phone 7 which was their first try at all-touch but multiple missteps cost them. From what I remember, WM6 was not at all compatible with WP7 and would force loyal customers and developers away from the platform. And then WP8 did the exact same thing losing more consumers and developers. By the time Windows 10 Mobile was launched, there wa
Re: (Score:2)
The ramblings of delusional butthurt Apple toadies are so entertaining. Man up, you lost the phone wars, you are distant number two with shrinking user base. FACT.
Deal with it: the Apple manikin only has a smooth spot down below where balls used to be.
Fucking Apple thugs, go molest some other social networking site.
Re: (Score:2)
The ramblings of delusional butthurt Apple toadies are so entertaining. Man up, you lost the phone wars, you are distant number two with shrinking user base. FACT.
Deal with it: the Apple manikin only has a smooth spot down below where balls used to be.
I see that thug Apple sent out its slithering social media troll mods again. Thug Apple and its slimey camp followers make me sick. What a great thing for the rest of us that thug Apple lost the war.
Yah, you can see thug Apple at work right here. Amazing how many mod points those pro thugmodders have saved up to "shape" social media opinion. Well, you shaped mine. Just keep doing it, you will regret it.
Thug Apple really is the most disgusting company in America. Workers jumping off buildings, phones exploding, employees silthering aound social networking sites, lying, cheating, stealing, not paying its taxes. Apple can suck my crusty shorts.
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I bought a Nokia 1520 out of curiosity for super cheap. It's a great phone, and a great OS once updated to 10. Sad that Microsoft lost confidence in the platform, it was a great phone.