
Bill Gates Just Confessed His Greatest Ever Mistake: He Still Hasn't Got over It - praveenscience
https://www.inc.com/chris-matyszczyk/bill-gates-just-confessed-his-greatest-ever-mistake-he-still-hasnt-got-over-it.html
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satysin
I would argue that was more a mistake of Ballmer than Gates. Sure Gates was
still involved with Microsoft but it was Ballmer who ran things day-to-day
when the iPhone and Android hit the scenes but he was too blinded by Windows
prior success and losing out to Apple with the iPad vs. Zune to see that
Android and not Apple was the bigger threat.

Sure Ballmer made those silly comments that the iPhone wouldn't sell (in part
he was right, they quickly dropped the price) but he was a fool for trying to
stick with Windows on a phone. There had been Windows Mobile devices for many
years before the iPhone and they all sucked. Trying to evolve that platform
was idiotic. It was the perfect chance for Microsoft to start from scratch
with a new platform but nope they decided to cut and slice away at Windows
until it ran on a mobile ARM SoC and it was overall pretty shitty. They tried
to put lipstick on the pig with Live Tiles and such but at the end of the day
it still had all the awful decades old junk that comes with Windows.

I guess another way of phrasing Mr. Gates comment would be "My biggest regret
is not giving Steve a kick in the ass to do something new rather than try and
shoe horn Windows into a phone"?

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matt-attack
You can hear in that video of Balmer why he failed: he checks off the features
line they’ve been solved; it does email, it does internet, it does music.

Zero understand of the experience. Zero understanding of the customer. Phones
and tech to him are things that you just do and check the box and move on.
What a complete non-visionary.

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gumby
His customers in big corporate IT (not the users) think that way so he was
being a good sales guy and thinking like the customer.

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js2
> The greatest mistake ever is the... 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.

Source:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5g4sPi1wd4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5g4sPi1wd4)

He was asked a question just after 9:00 in the video about work/life balance
in the early days of Microsoft and includes this in his answer around 11:40.

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latexr
Thank you. This is a really click-bait title. Even after you start reading, it
takes nine (!) single sentence paragraphs to reach anything substantial.

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ShamelessC
Yeah this article is terrible.

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ohiovr
Windows CE and windows mobile was terrible, making it open source, or
aggressive 3rd party handset adoption with it would not change anything.
Windows phone was too little too late.

Android copied how iOS worked and felt fairly closely to it and it became an
affordable alternative product for the non bourgeoisie.

iOS is not so intuitive that anyone can pick it up and figure out how to use
it. There are still older people that don't understand it and handset
interfaces could be improved if a company can stomach throwing away a few
complete designs for the sake of clarity. Microsoft just didn't have the
vision required to make something that had its own merit besides being the
poor mans iOS. To say that handsets can never be improved and that iOS is
fundamentally the best it can ever be is short sighted. Of course a new
paradigm can be found that is superior. An also ran that is cheaper is running
with an also ran that has been around way longer that already fills that role.
So the only way to get that market is to innovate.

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karmakaze
Windows CE and Windows Phone were different things and the late realization of
this is a large part of the problem. The later versions of the Windows Phone
UX were great in both usability and responsiveness.

The main problem was a lack of focus. The developer experience was a rehash of
desktop models that were reworked for mobile but not portable either, so you
had something very similar and incompatible. This was not a place to be
extending the desktop (Windows CE, Forms).

I find it hard to believe that MS took mobile seriously producing only the
low-quality devkits and limited marketing they did. I also wouldn't count them
out just yet either. iPadOS (or iTableOS?) is showing that there's a third
platform yet to come and MS Surface with good dev tooling and app runtime
could win over Flutter/Fuchsia.

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ValentineC
Discussion from another thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251642](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251642)

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xcklo
That seems like a weird regret to have. Like most things there often isn't
that much you can do when as the situation evolves as you don't have the
luxury of hindsight. Transforming into something completly different isn't
going to happen. What they should be bitter about is not being able to compete
on their own terms. Microsoft is still one of the, if not the, leader in many
market segments. They just haven't really been unable to use that fact. But
that is of course a much deeper problem that you probably wouldn't drop in an
interview.

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mtnygard
I assumed it would be 640K. Nope, it's phones.

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albandread
I thought he said it was ctrl-alt-delete before. I think he has been cleared
on the whole 640K thing. I guess he must be talking commercially; rather than
about technology or ethics.

