
Bill Gates on making “one of the greatest mistakes of all time” - chdaniel
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/22/bill-gates-on-making-one-of-the-greatest-mistakes-of-all-time/
======
HillRat
What I find interesting is that he still doesn’t realize that _because_
Microsoft was dominant in specific plays (desktop OSes, productivity software,
e-mail clients) it was precluded by internal culture from innovating on
mobile.

Their success blinded them to the fact that mobile and tablets comprised a
completely different functional and experiential environment, and so they kept
pushing a “Windows everywhere, Outlook everywhere” strategy that failed to
create a smartphone market they initially owned, failed to take advantage of
the business mobile market Blackberry created, failed to take advantage of the
premium consumer mobile market Apple created, and failed to take advantage of
the mass consumer mobile market Android created (despite their last bite at
the mobile OS apple — so to speak — being quite good).

Nothing breeds failure quite like success even, evidently, in hindsight.

~~~
millstone
Exactly right. Microsoft was profoundly ahead of the curve! They were pushing
their tablet/slate stuff 5+ years before the iPhone and iPad. Their key
mistake was attempting to _leverage Windows_ , which forced an awkward stylus
mode driving a shoehorned desktop OS.

Apple blindsided them with a better cellphone instead of a worse computer, and
so it slotted in naturally

Microsoft could only conceive of Windows devices. Apple's big idea was to
_not_ make the iPhone a Mac. If anything, they overcorrected, dragged kicking
and screaming into allowing apps at all.

~~~
irq
> If anything, they overcorrected, dragged kicking and screaming into allowing
> apps at all.

A lot of people forget this, but it's true: Apple didn't want _anyone_ to be
able to make native apps on iOS except themselves. That they changed their
minds and helped devs make a ton of money tends to erase this fact of history.

~~~
kijiki
I have this conspiracy theory that I half believe: it was all a ruse.

Apple knew that there would be huge pushback against a walled garden appstore
with Apple in absolute control, and huge pushback on them taking a 30% cut. So
they started with "just write web apps". But of course, they also inexplicably
made the first iPhone 2G only! Flagship phones that shipped many months before
the iPhone had 3G. Why cut that particular corner, and not any others in their
otherwise $$$-is-no-object new wonderphone?

You can do a much better job hiding low bandwidth and high latency in a native
app, especially since app assets get downloaded once (probably over wifi) at
app install time. So by essentially making app developers beg for access to
their native platform, they radically reduced the anger at their wildly
locked-down appstore and their 30% cut.

And it seemed a little suspicious how quickly they were able to deliver a 3rd-
party SDK and developer documentation.

~~~
joachimma
Wasn't Palm taking a 80% cut in their glory days? (My google skills fail me) I
heard developers saying that 30% was a great deal at the time.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
I think it was Handango that set the 30% expectation. They were the first with
such a high cut I think, and was among the first app sites for most of the
PDAs of the time.

30% was pretty offensive after years of shareware.

~~~
Theodores
But then apps cost pennies compared to the software we were used to. Office
cost many hundreds of dollars and I regularly paid £400+ for PC programs that
did just one thing. £350 for Photoshop was a steal.

But then apps came along costing a small handful of dollars. They also did
things you could not do on your PC due to the connectivity, the camera and the
sensors. Everything changed when it came to price expectations.

------
zmmmmm
Somehow nobody really seems to acknowledge the real reason Android won to my
mind: that it was open source. Not for end users, but for OEMs. The whole
reason they were willing to unify on Android as a platform was that it allowed
_hardware_ differentiation and innovation in a way that Windows Phone didn't,
because they could actually create their own features and add them to the OS.
So of course the best hardware and the most unique features and the biggest
marketing budget and most aggressive carrier deals were always going to come
on Android first. Because Windows Phone nullified part of the reason for OEMs
to exist in the first place. Microsoft tried to control too much of the
market, I assume out of Apple-envy - something they didn't even do with
windows. I don't know why they expected it to work.

~~~
IggleSniggle
You’re right. That said, I am still so sad about Windows Phone going away. To
my mind, it is still one of the best Smartphone UX that has yet existed,
bested only by voice/passive-screen Moto X 2013.

The vision for Windows Phone was unified information, screen-time minimalism,
and the most brilliant sound/rumble design I have experienced on any device.
The Moto X was a close second by finding ways to avoid needing to look at your
screen entirely. By contrast, Apple and Samsung have been focused on screen-
addiction, not user efficiency/productivity. iOS Screen Time is the weirdest
mea culpa, but works because efficient mobile experiences failed to sell.

~~~
iforgotpassword
Agreed. They perfected the UI with 8.1.

It appears Windows 8 was developed for mobile first and then shoehorned onto
the desktop version of the OS. On desktop it felt like an ugly, unpolished
incomplete mess, two OS running side by side at the same time.

Windows 10 brought much more polish to the desktop, the modern apps integrate
much better, more and more setting dialogs get ported to uwp.

But at the same time the mobile version of 10 felt less optimized than 8.1,
almost like a compromise between desktop and mobile. While that helped getting
closer to the goal of a unified experience between desktop and mobile, this
was ultimately the wrong vision anyways. And ironically now that mobile is
dead, what is even the point in continuing to transform Windows 10 away from
win32 to uwp? I'm aware they still have the Xbox which also supports uwp apps
but here I see even less of a reason to create this cross platform experience.

------
kazinator
> _In fact, Gates is still kicking himself for taking his eyes off the ball
> and allowing Google to develop Android, the “standard non-Apple phone form
> platform,” as he describes it. “That was a natural thing for Microsoft to
> win.”_

That seems very out of touch, bordering on historic revisionism. Microsoft
developed an OS for mobile devices and embedded use since around the mid
1990's, with a _feverish_ desperation.

Mobile-Internet-capable devices running Windows CE already existed at the time
Google was just starting up. I worked on these damn things that time, doing
mobile networking!

Phones running Windows Mobile existed years before smartphones.

Microsoft had more than a decade head start over Google and arguably had their
eyes squarely fixated on some sort of ball the whole time. It was perhaps the
wrong ball.

The problem with the idea that it was "a natural thing for Microsoft to win"
is that it basically means this: "Microsoft won the PC desktop with a garbage
operating system, and so it is natural that Microsoft can go on to win in any
area by flogging another garbage operating system".

As if it were a matter of something resembling imperial succession? The
platform dominance throne "naturally" belongs to none other than the future
progeny of Microsoft by divine birthright?

In reality, it's just luck, timing and various economic factors. Now Google
dominates with their garbage platform.

------
m0zg
Yeah, I used to think that things will crash and burn if I disappear for a
week when I was younger. Truth is, not only do things not crash and burn, they
in fact barely change at all if I go on a 2-3 week vacation. You think the
company will land on the moon by the time you return, and then you get back
and it's the same shit, barely anything has changed.

Nowadays, though, my friends at MS say that it's one of the best large
employers to work for in terms of work life balance. They don't pay the top
dollar, but there are many people who would gladly trade that for the work
environment in which they can also have a life.

------
WalterBright
Back in the 90's, I thought about small computers, maybe even handhelds. But I
never connected that thought with a phone.

It just seems so thunderingly obvious today.

Makes me wonder what connection I'm not making today.

It's like when Henry Ford said if he'd asked what people wanted, they'd want
"a faster horse". We're all constrained by what we're used to thinking about,
and simply improving what we're already used to.

~~~
toyg
It was just timing, really. MS invested a lot in PDAs, at a time when the tech
just wasn’t good enough. The screens were bad, you had to use styluses, memory
was low, batteries would deplete in a few hours, cameras and GPS were too big
to even consider shipping... it was a niche market for a certain type of
business user, and that was it. Those PDAs did much better than the Apple
Newton, but didn’t break into the mainstream.

Then technology improved, Apple made some smart acquisitions, and changed the
UI game enough to become popular. It made Windows CE (and its competitors like
Symbian) look terribly dated. MS fumbled their response not once, not twice,
but three times: first they tried doubling down on what they had, then they
rewrote from scratch, then they rewrote from scratch _again_. By the time they
found a good balance, it was all over.

Meanwhile, Google was actually going through the early-MS playbook pretty
religiously: get something that already exists, improve and rebadge it, then
give it away as _free to the consumer_ (which MS did with oem deals and piracy
tolerance), effectively commoditizing it. Spread it far and wide until it
becomes _the_ platform, then leverage your ecosystem hegemony to achieve your
true cashflow aims with higher-level tooling and apps. Massive availability
made it the easy choice for oems, developers, and hobbyists/evangelists alike,
turning the mobile OS in a commodity while competitors were still very
determined to make a buck on it. This is what MS had done to hardware
manufacturers in the ‘90s, and it’s extraordinary how they failed to see the
parallels until it was too late. Or maybe not - after all, MS by then was the
new IBM.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
I had a friend at work who'd been a big fan of the Nokia Communicators who got
one of the early bastard phone/PDA/Windows CE spawn. Similar form factor to
the communicator - sideways foldaway keyboard, but 99% of everything seemed to
need the stylus. It even had a start button in the UI. HTC I think - this must
have been back in the early 00s.

After he'd bought this thing there was... _So. Much. Swearing._ :)

From my recollection the only thing it did reliably was crash. A lot. An awful
lot. Oh, and that the UI was comically fiddly.

He went back to the communicator, then later bought just a regular phone, the
fancy Windows crashing thing became his in car map to run autoroute. It used
to crash just running that.

A few of the guys in the office had used Compaq or HP PDAs and were keen on
the idea of the then new Windows phones - his early adoption saved them all
from an expensive mistake. Me? I stuck with the Psion 5. :)

~~~
toyg
I lusted after a few of those and eventually got an HP, around 2004. I loved
the concept and could live with the stylus, but sync capabilities (ActiveSync,
brr) were atrocious, even more so with anything non-Windows (I was on Linux at
the time). Also it didn't have wifi, so I had to buy an expansion card, which
stuck out very unsightly (and looked very fragile).

When the iPhone came out, I thought it was nice but overpriced, limited by not
having expansion cards, and knee-capped by Apple's policy on rooting. It took
me a couple of years to admit nobody really cared about those things.

------
jarjoura
I don't really understand what Bill Gates is getting at here.

Back in 2010, Android was still very clunky and sluggish. Windows Phone was
sleek and fast. Both OSes allowed you to install developer tools and write
software for free.

However, there's 2 differences that no one calls out! First, Android used Java
as a way to leverage 15 years of software. Windows Phone v1 was c# only and
back in 2010 no one except Stack Overflow was writing anything other than
enterprise software in C#. So you literally had to write 95% of your software
from the ground up.

Second, instead of quickly catching up, feature for feature with Apple and
Android, only 2 years behind at the start, they stopped, not once, but two
times to re-write their Phone OS still using the original feature set from
2010.

They should have 1, BENT over BACKWARDS to get every API they could and ship
C++ and Java compilers. Talk to developers about what they needed to get their
software written. In 2010 and 2011 there were hundreds of developers at every
company that would have loved a small 20% project to bring up their software
on a Windows Phone. Yet with it only allowing C#, it would have required
developers 80% of their time and that was just not a reality.

Second, they should have continually added features and more features, and
innovated on features that no one else had. 2010 still had a lot of room for
owning the narrative of what a mobile device could be.

I don't know about you, but it frustrates me that they don't own up to their
actual mistakes. It's not about the lack of companies building the apps, it's
that whoever managed that Phone project was incompetent and mismanaged the
whole thing. They treated it like just another 9 to 5 job with little
expressed passion for winning.

~~~
jeremyjh
Objective C wasn't really a big thing before the iPhone. I know MacOS used it
but its not like it had the rich open source community that Java had, and most
iOS developers were learning it for the first time. I think this failure
wasn't about programming languages; if the platform had succeeded then C#
would have been just that much more popular.

~~~
jarjoura
Obj-C was niche yes, but Obj-C worked really well with C/C++.

~~~
fzort
Yeah, and with OpenGL ES/OpenAL support it was pretty easy to port C++ games
to the iPhone, with just a thin Obj-C wrapper.

------
espeed
_It really is winner take all ... There’s room for exactly one non-Apple
operating system, and what’s that worth? $400 billion that would be
transferred from company G [Google] to company M [Microsoft]. -- Bill Gates_

Who'd have known in 2011 that by 2019, The Four Greatest Companies in the
world (by cap) would be All-America [1], Microsoft would be back on top, and
then combined together, they spell MAGA -- in almost perfect order too [2]...

    
    
         Symbol  Company      Cap         Rank 
    
      M  MSFT    Microsoft      1.05 T    1
      A  AMZN    Amazon.com   940.99 B    2
      G  GOOG    Alphabet     779.39 B    4
      A  AAPL    Apple        914.60 B    3
    

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-
America](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-America)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again#Socia...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again#Social_media_usage)

~~~
Phillipharryt
Though funnily two of those 4 are founded by foreigners, both sons of
immigrants (and Sergey is himself one).

------
simonblack
Bill always suffered from "NIH" (Not Invented Here) Syndrome.

Google took something that worked (Linux) and prettied up the User Interface.
Apple had pretty much done the same sort of thing earlier with BSD UNIX and
OSX. Bill was ideologically opposed to Linux right from the start because it
was Open Source.

Consequently, Microsoft had to do 10 times the work to achieve success that
Google needed to. Google was up and running while Microsoft was still
struggling along to get things to work.

That's probably the main reason that Google dominates smartphones and
Microsoft doesn't.

~~~
hacker_9
As someone who owned a windows phone and switched to Android, the reason was
simple - no apps. Everyone would advertise the latest thing as on iPhone and
Droid, windows phone literally wasn't mentioned. I can't speak to the bigger
picture but as far as I could see there was little reason to further spend
money on a platform no one cared for.

~~~
toyg
But that happened because MS was late to the party, as parent poster said. By
the time their “good” OS was ready, everyone was already writing apps for iOS
and Android and nobody wanted yet another different platform to develop for.
They tried hard to entice developers, even paying pretty good money, but it
was just too late. Nokia had the same problem a bit earlier (well, among
_many_ other problems Nokia had...).

~~~
vezycash
Many developers HATED Microsoft. The anti-Microsoft chant was at an all time
high. Android developer registration fee was a ONE TIME FEE of (?). The
Android operating system was just like Windows - anything goes, no
restrictions!

 _How Microsoft lost Developers_

Shitty & Successful VS Secure & Failure

Microsoft decided to recreate IOS because they'd been (and are still being)
ridiculed for the security nightmare called Windows.

Balmer announced the developer fee and the scream (even here on HN) was
enormous. Add the api restrictions and developers just said fuck it!

People on this thread are saying how nice it was to develop for Windows Phone
compared to Android - bull. Screams about how you couldn't accomplish simple
tasks - compared to Android was high. Till today, there are apps that show the
message - due to Microsoft's restrictions (something) can't be accomplished -
when the same thing was possible on IOS.

 _How Microsoft lost OEMs_

Android was free. Windows Phone wasn't. OEMs could modify Android and add
whatever crap they wanted to make pennies. But WP couldn't. You didn't need
Google's permission to build an Android device. With WP - you couldn't.

MS gave preferential treatment to Nokia. Karma - MS's reputation With Windows
bit it hard on the ass here.

 _How Microsoft lost Users_

NOKIA - Nokia was in the habit of releasing this year's flagship with last
year's specs. Only their cameras was worth something.

MS was SLOOW to respond to feature requests that IOS and Android got eons ago.
Feature envy was high. Peeps celebrated addition of notification bar like the
release of a new phone.

NIH syndrome - Apple and Google copied each other extensively and copied from
Windows Phone when it made sense. WP stood like a statue

Pissing off developers resulted in fewer apps.

They couldn't survive writing brand new OSes 3 times. Windows phone 7 was
different from CE. WP 8 - different from 7. And finally, 10 was different from
8.

There were minor issues Within sub versions. MS got the enmity of users who
got burned and couldn't upgrade

 _Media, Influencers & Trolls_

I don't know what these guys had against Microsoft however, their role in
killing Wp can't be understated - and Microsoft/Nokia helped. Nokia kept
releasing dated hardware - media ignored the fact that the OS didn't need it.
In fact, at the time IOS devices ran lower clock speed and used 500mb ram.

Everything MS/Nokia did was SHIT and the same shit became gold whenever Apple
ended up doing the same thing. Nokia was trolled for the camera bulge on Lumia
920, but that's what companies are doing right now. The Lumia 920 weighed 180g
and was called the "BRICK." They said 920 was best used as a weapon against
burglars. Fast forward to iPhone XS Max which weighs 208g and they love it.
They hated the flat design on WP but loved it when Apple co-opted it.

Everyone loves wireless Charging but Nokia was trolled for it.

This intense media hate made fans create windowsphone central and microsoft-
news to balance the emotion.

The final nail in the curtain was the interface. WP was very intuitive to
smart phone virgins. However for people already corrupted by Android and IOS,
WP was alien, weird and difficult to use.

~~~
matthewdgreen
Lumia 920 had a 4.5in screen size and iPhone XS Max is a ginormous phablet
with a 6.5in screen. Lesson of this entire post: you can’t release things that
have feature parity and worse specifications, but specifications aren’t a
barrier when you’re providing features.

------
6thaccount2
I'm a Linux fanboy that hates desktop Windows with a passion.

However, both I and everyone I know that has ever used a Windows phone (there
were several of us at work) absolutely loved the platform when compared to
Android and iPhone. I'm running a top end Google phone and still missing my
Nokia Lumia Windows Phone. That phone had a great OS and was Rock solid.

The problem was nobody wanted to give it a try. The hardware looked bad, but
it honestly didn't need to be as good as Android as it wasn't as bloated. This
is somewhat anecdotal, but dual core Windows Phone7 ran smoother than quad
core Android at the time.

~~~
megaremote
> However, both I and everyone I know that has ever used a Windows phone
> (there were several of us at work) absolutely loved the platform when
> compared to Android and iPhone.

Rubbish. Their CE phones were awful, and lots of people hated Micrsofts
Windows phones and their laggy tiles.

~~~
AnonymousPlanet
In around 2012 we had a couple of smart phones at work for evaluation. The
Windows phone made the most rounds because everyone was amazed at how bad it
was. We would hand it to colleagues who hadn't seen it yet and watch them
struggle and curse while trying to do even the most basic tasks. The platform
was Windows 7, I think.

~~~
6thaccount2
Now this I have trouble believing. What "basic" tasks did they struggle with?

------
nine_k
All users of windows phone I know liked it, some outright loved it. It got a
number of design decisions right.

Lumia hardware was good, and the camera was more than excellent. Software was
lacking but it could be improved to maturity.

Too bad we now have two players and not three or four (blackberry). This is
indeed not because of lack of engineering prowess or customer interest.

~~~
edoceo
BlackBerry still out here making good hardware, runs Android tho. I love the
KeyOne&Two, they are awesome business device.

~~~
Phillipharryt
It does sadden me a bit that they don't make their own software anymore. For
productivity it's so hard to beat their older OS and even OS10 is slick (I
still use it today). It was strange though because their architecture supports
android apps but you can't download them out-of-the-box.

------
topkai22
I thought in 2007 and I still think today the fundamental reason why there was
space for the iPhone to be the phenomenon it was is that 1) The success of the
iPod let them dictate terms to AT&T and get subsidies no one else could while
keeping the customer experience clean in a way competitors couldn't (US phones
had an unbelievable amount of crapware in the mid 00s, including great ideas
like flashing the firmware to prevent camera phones from transferring photos
over USB and forcing you to use a carrier service that covost $1/photo) 2)
Microsoft's antitrust hangover prevented their mobile department from strong
arming carriers earlier on

Microsoft's real mistake post iPhone release (and definitely post Android
release) was not immediately making Windows phone free, OSS would have been
nice, but I think most manufacturers moved to Android as their flagship
because they got it free.

~~~
polyomino
It wasn't free they got paid. Google shared mobile search revenue with
manufacturers.

------
CPLX
Sounds to me like the antitrust actions were effective.

The world would _not_ be a better place if MS had overwhelming mobile market
share or had won the browser wars.

------
apo
> You know, in the software world, in particular for platforms, these are
> winner-take-all markets. 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.

Perfectly in character for Gates to see the mistake as failure to enter the
market with the copycat product rather than the product that creates an
entirely new category.

I suppose the world needs people like this, but by golly there's no reason for
them to get any more than acknowledgement for being one of many players.

If Microsoft had a history of doing things right consistently in the copycat
position, that might be different. But as a generally mediocre player wielding
a monopoly position to follow the technological lead of others Microsoft is
really quite uninspiring.

~~~
rossdavidh
Yeah, it is an especially silly statement because Blackberry and Apple ios
both existed at the time Android came out, so obviously it was NOT
fundamentally a winner-take-all market. He kind of backwards-admits this by
calling it the "non-Apple" market.

------
thelazydogsback
I think one of his biggest mistakes was fighting so hard against the DoJ
wanting to break up the company into separate App and Sys companies -- not
that the lawsuit was justified (and being all but moot by the time it was
settled), but that it would have been a good thing for the company, forcing
more healthy and creative interactions and acting as a new model for 3rd-party
interaction.

As noted, MS was early to research and market in several areas including
tablets and mobile, but either lacked a creativity escape velocity or quit
just before hardware was up to the task, then failing at a restart. As someone
who has spent their early career creating voice recognition products, it's
also frustrating that they were so far ahead with speech reco (hiring the CMU
peeps, many versions of SAPI, etc.) and then totally failing to do anything
interesting with it at the OS and app level. If not mobile, MS should have
been first for in-home voice assistant devices. (My and others' protestations
for multi-modal or voice-only devices landed on deaf ears.)

As for Windows Phone, not allowing Silverlight apps to load/run on it from the
web was a horrible decision, as this would have allowed u/x experiences that
were years away from happening in the mobile browser.

Personally, I miss the T-Mobile Sidekick and the Blackberry Curve devices --
really all you need is Select, ExecuteThis and ContextMenuThis to do
everything -- I was disappointed when Android gave up on the context menu.
However, Android is still leagues better than iOS where every app is an
adventure game.

[disclaimer: my first stint at MS was during the aforementioned time from
'90-95.)

------
gesman
Biggest mistake was to let Ballmer to stall Microsoft progress, creativity and
business for a decade.

Say it, Bill

~~~
fuzzfactor
One of the biggest examples of how a leader of technical people will influence
their performance by either bringing them up toward a lofty leadership level,
or in the case where a leadership position is held by a party less technically
qualified than the ones they are in a position to lead, the performance will
be ground down to the lesser level, with the relative bozoness becoming more
prominent than the underlying technical ability of the workforce through time.

Even with smaller "organizations" or institutions the momentum of the time
factor involved when reversing between wisdom and foolishness can really
obscure the true sources of the wisdom or foolishness to begin with.

------
im_down_w_otp
I briefly had a Nokia Lumia 920 running Windows 8 Mobile, and I loved it...
except for the apps. I otherwise really liked the device, the UI, the overall
user experience. It was a nice alternative to the multiple iPhones I'd owned
up to that point.

I've now been an Android user (Nexus 5, Moto X Pure, Nokia 6.1 Plus) for a few
years. I've never been quite satisfied with the platform and the various
quirks of the phones I've owned. Everytime the iPhone SE's make their way back
to Apple's refurb site I almost purchase one for myself and my wife. I wish
Windows Mobile had managed to generate enough interest and gravity to sustain
as a viable alternative.

------
RickJWagner
Disappointed. I thought it was Clippy.

~~~
cultofmetatron
Clippy was the brainchild of Microsoft employee Melinda French whom later
changed her name to Melinda Gates. needless to say, Bill is not going to admit
that one...

------
joshanderson
That’s a bit like saying “I wish I had had the idea for a search engine before
Google, then I would have been the next Google.” It doesn’t work like that in
business.

You could have given Microsoft everything they needed to dominate in mobile
and they still would have screwed it up because of the Microsoft mentality
back then. Even after iPhone came out, Ballmer famously said iPhones were
stupid.

------
netwanderer3
Everybody eventually will make a graveyard mistake as you really just can't
win all the time. It's just part of the cycle isn't it? Steve Ballmer was on
the path to destroy Microsoft, and they were very lucky to have found Satya
Nadella before it became all too late. He's truly their savior.

------
ryenus
> In fact, Gates is still kicking himself for taking his eyes off the ball and
> allowing Google to develop Android

And those in Google are probably also kicking themselves for taking their eyes
off the ball and allowing Oracle to acquire Sun

~~~
zaphirplane
Whatever for would google want sun. Java is open source, Solaris and sparc are
struggling

~~~
Phillipharryt
Perhaps all the lawsuits (or I guess one lawsuit that has been going on for
more than a decade with all the appeals). At this point I'm sure it would have
been cheaper to acquire Sun than to drag this out and still potentially face
fines in the billions.

------
breck
> You know, in the software world, in particular for platforms, these are
> winner-take-all markets. ...There’s room for exactly one non-Apple operating
> system

Would there be a general rule here that he is not thinking of? The general
rule being that there is only room for 1 closed-source platform?

I can imagine that the winner of the closed-source platform race will be the
team that doesn't take vacations of weekends, but does the same hold for the
open source alternative platform? It seems to me that speed is less essential
in the open source world and that it's more of a long-term battle.

~~~
holoduke
Lots of variables what can change that duo dominance theory. For example when
China closes their borders and grow their own phone OS and at the same time
spread it in Africa and South America. Not unlikely to happen.

~~~
walshemj
Will they actually develop from scratch or just clone android?

~~~
reaperducer
It's already done.

[https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3001685/huawei-
co...](https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3001685/huawei-confirms-it-
has-built-its-own-operating-system-just-case-us)

------
megaremote
Microsoft owned the smartphone market with CE, once palm went under. But they
let it languish. You can see this happening today with Google's decisions to
pull out of tablets, and close a number of products.

------
MrQuincle
Actually I expected this to be about his current activities. What would be his
largest mistake with respect to effective altruism?

A mistake there is about the life or death of thousands of people. Maybe more.

------
Spearchucker
Now that Android is what it's become my biggest disappointment with Microsoft
is that Nadella killed Windows Phone. Having used Android for close to two
years now it blows my mind how bad Android UX is, given it's age, and how
insanely good Windows Phone was, given IT'S age.

Not even starting to talk about the privacy side of it.

------
lazyjones
Looks like he‘d agree with Jack Ma about „sacrifices“ in early years... Let’s
see how much flak he‘ll get for that.

~~~
adventured
Gates was clear in the interview, that it only applied to him. He said "for my
makeup" it was applicable. He also explained that he believed: "it was
possible to over mythologize the idea of working extremely hard." He also said
point-blank that he doesn't recommend it.

That's the only correct position to take. Quite simply to each their own. Who
is anyone else to tell me how to spend my hours? Gates is careful to make a
distinction between projecting how others should be, and stating how he chose
to be.

~~~
lovehashbrowns
Some people work better in short bursts. Some people work better in sprints
with longer breaks in between. That's why I don't feel bad when I work hard
for a few weeks and slack off for a bit afterwards. I'll never personally
understand the idea of a strict 9-5. It seems to go completely against
everything I've learned about people in my life.

~~~
tcard
> It seems to go completely against everything I've learned about people in my
> life.

Have you ever met people with children?

Generally, strict hours enable simple, well-defined coordination with others.
You often _need_ that kind of agreement when others are taking care of your
children in your behalf, e. g. schoolteachers, partners, grandparents.

------
rramadass
MS is still making the mistake of not pushing the Laptop-Tablet combo device.
The "Surface Pro" series are ideal for merging Laptop+Tablet+Phone devices. In
this day and age, i do NOT want to carry three devices but NEED a multi-
functional device.

~~~
scarface74
And you have compromises. Windows sucks as a tablet OS.

------
JamesBarney
Another huge mistake was they tried to incentivize app development instead of
good app development. There were good apps on the windows phone, but it had so
much rubbish the good apps were hard to find.

~~~
r00fus
As opposed to the fart apps on iOS? No there were rubbish apps on all other
platforms just that Apple created the iFund to promote startups based on apps
and Google also had issues with app quality and quantity early too.

------
Bakary
Feels like there is an opportunity cost to not have time off early on in your
life. Even if you somehow end up a billionaire later, you can't get your
twenties and early thirties back.

~~~
leesalminen
I gave my twenties to the tech startup founder life. I won’t be giving my
thirties to it.

------
tellme_throwa
With android we can at least replace few parts, and get a functional unix
terminal even without root. If you can degoogle and / or root, android is
great.

And BillG didn't deserve it...

------
kerng
Google didn't invent Android, they bought it. Maybe Microsoft's big mistake
was to let that happen.

~~~
Izkata
It seems[0] that the Android bought by Google was a camera OS with cloud
storage. Not a phone, nor did it have apps. All that came from Google, and was
being developed before the iPhone was announced.

[0] [https://www.androidauthority.com/history-android-os-
name-789...](https://www.androidauthority.com/history-android-os-name-789433/)

~~~
Phillipharryt
If you read Battle of the Titans, you'll see Android was left to its own
devices once acquired, so you could say it was a team that what would
eventually build the Android we know, regardless of who bought it. Google
contributed cash but didn't do anything Microsoft couldn't if they had
acquired them.

~~~
sokoloff
Completely disagree. Google shared mobile search ad revenue with carriers and
device makers using Android OS. Microsoft couldn't (as a matter of
practicality) offer that advantage.

~~~
Phillipharryt
Fair enough, but do be careful of founder revisionist history. Independent
research is usually better at digging up company origins than the "tales from
the inside" that founders tout. (Though I'm not disputing the revenue split
advantage)

------
mlthoughts2018
Just imagine combining this attitude with start-up unlimited vacation
policies.

~~~
0x8BADF00D
Unlimited vacation is literal for me. I will abuse the shit out of it until
told otherwise. Quite frankly, it doesn’t bother me one bit.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
I don’t understand. Are you saying you’re unbothered by the disingenuous use
of unlimited vacation policies by start-ups and others seeking to avoid
payouts on unused PTO while also creating a culture that implicitly pressures
workers to take less vacation?

I’m not making a normative judgment about your comment (for example, you are
clear that it’s totally down to your personal use of the vacation policy, and
that you don’t consider how it affects others when deciding whether to be
bothered by it ... this is not bad or good, just one particular way to attach
an evaluation to the policy). I’m just asking to clarify b/c it’s not clear to
me which aspect of my comment you’re replying to.

~~~
0x8BADF00D
> Are you saying you’re unbothered by the disingenuous use of unlimited
> vacation policies by start-ups and others seeking to avoid payouts on unused
> PTO while also creating a culture that implicitly pressures workers to take
> less vacation?

I am saying that I am unbothered by exploiting an exploitative system that is
not internally consistent.

If a company tells me unlimited vacation, that means unlimited vacation. If
they tell me two weeks it means two weeks. If I am expected to infer that a
policy is the opposite of what it says, then how can I remain sane?

~~~
mlthoughts2018
What do you do in a company that tells you “unlimited vacation” but then takes
subtle retaliatory or punitive action towards you, in ways fully insulated
from any kind of worker appeal for wrongdoing?

Usually you’ll be pressured not to take much vacation, and passed over for
promotion or raises, etc., if you don’t comply, and they’ll just manage you
out, probably feeling happy when you eventually quit or something.

A lot of people are also stuck in the sense that they don’t have the financial
freedom or job market liquidity to quit because of this, and are essentially
forced to accept it or else go unemployed.

------
Ari_Ugwu
All of this paved the way for Nadella. I count it as a net gain.

------
FatalLogic
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.

~~~
jodrellblank
_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.

~~~
Zak
Gates wrote:

> _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.

~~~
jodrellblank
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:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pocket_PC_Devices](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pocket_PC_Devices)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Windows_Mobile_devices](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Windows_Mobile_devices)

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](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?

------
thinkingkong
Ugh. This is somehow going to get translated into “vacation = failure” and
thats a tragedy. Im used to a culture of 2 weeks max a year because thats
whats legally required, and that amount of time gives you no time to reflect,
no time to relax, and little time to come up with unique ways to solve
problems. I really hope this was taken out of context.

~~~
ghshephard
Enjoy your two-weeks. A lot of companies in the valley now have "No Allocated
Vacation" \- which, in many scenarios, means you get Christmas off and that's
about it for quite a stretch. (And also, of course, means they don't have to
pay out your vacation when you leave - as you never had any coming to you)

~~~
dsfyu404ed
I assume you're taking a dig at "unlimited vacation".

You should really redirect your anger at your company culture.

We have "unlimited vacation" where I work.

Even a couple years back when things were not looking good most people took
about 4wk which in practice is more like 5wk if you utilize the days off we
get before/after major holidays. It's common for the H1Bs to pick a random
month and use that time to go home to visit family. I took 3wk or so and it
came up in my performance review and I was encouraged to take more if I wanted
to. It's not just my team that's like this either.

One of the many reasons I prefer to do tech somewhere other than the
overpriced west coast meat grinders.

~~~
ghshephard
Companies have "No Allocated" vacation (By no stretch of the imagination is it
unlimited) - for exactly _one_ reason - so they don't have to carry the pay-
out liability on their books.

But, an ugly side effect, is because there is no allocation, there is also no
forcing function for people to "use-it-or-lose-it" \- which also means when
you are in crunch-time (which defines every startup I've ever worked for in
the first 4-5 years) - it effectively means no vacation, excepting Christmas,
which still seems to be untouchable (so far).

------
JudgeWapner
His greatest mistake was allowing UX and quality of the windows platform to
descend into the plague that it was for the better part of 2 decades. I can't
imagine a world where my phone were as unreliable and vulnerable as, say,
windows Vista.

~~~
TwoBit
You are getting downvoted, but there's truth in what you say. Microsoft's idea
of a phone OS was always simply a port of Windows. If fact their early efforts
failed in part because they insisted on making it a port of Windows.

~~~
JudgeWapner
it's also telling how Gates' phrasing implies a false dichotomy where there's
Apple's platform plus room for only _one_ other competitor. The only reason
it's that way now is because of abuse of patent law and other anti-competitive
business practices. We could just as easily live in a world where there are 6
proprietary mobile OS vendors plus several open source versions built on
easily-interchangeable interfaces (thanks to FTC-mandate) all vying to be #1
among onsumers by offering the best UX and features. To me, his language
indicates he can't even comprehend a world where MS has to compete on a level
playing field by developing a superior technology that users prefer.

