Bill Gates on making “one of the greatest mistakes of all time”

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.

Besides that, if every company is paying the same amount for a Windows license, they all add it into the price of selling a PC.

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.

In the world where you have two months to get some ridiculous feature out because your competitor announced they’re doing it, it helps to just have the source code and throw engineers at the problem.

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. :)

To rephrase it, the issue wasn’t fundamentally technological it was an ingrained assumption at Ms, palm, Nokia that the price needs to be below x and Apple challenged that assumption in one risky Vision

And they were not at all alone in that. A lot of us were totally blinded by that wave of PDAs and first experiments with tablets. E.g. I spent '98-'99 largely working on a tablet [1]. It was a beautiful piece of hardware for what we could do with the constraints, but those tradeoffs also all reflect the limitations that killed it:

The back "tube" held the batteries and doubled to lift the back slightly to make it easier to read the screen if you put it on a desk like a phone. But you could not get away from the fact it made it builky. It used a DECT (cordless phone standard) extension because wifi was not yet common, but of course the moment wifi took off nobody wanted that, and it had to get wifi.

We spent lots of effort writing a GUI toolkit for Nano-X (an compact little GUI engine with a somewhat X11 and somewhat Win32 API frontends [2] ), and contributing a bunch of code for Nano-X itself. And while Nano-X was excellent for what it was, all of that effort was down to memory and flash limitations (32MB RAM, 16MB flash), and meant applications had to be custom written, as while the API was X11-like it was not a direct match. And browser based apps was certainly not a option because that, well, it wasn't really much of a thing yet.

We spent ages with Opera getting them to port Opera to work under those constraints (to their credit the browser engine took very little time to retarget), though, and the results were great for the size of the device, but again it was a choice that was expensive for a small startup, but necessary because the device was so hardware-limited.

The bezels are massive partly because a bigger screen would have been too expensive, heavy and power hungry, partly to accomodate the rest of the board.

Touch was all resistive, because capacitative touch screens where not a viable option at the time.

The batteries didn't last long. Not that it mattered much, as you'd have to stay within a few hundred meters of your DECT base-station anyway, and so couldn't really take it out of the house.

And many more.

That it'd fail to get traction seems obvious now - it got geeks excited (especially because it ran Linux). I loved working on it. But just like "everyone" I knew had a Palm Pilot but Palm Pilots still didn't break through into the mainstream, this didn't get regular people excited either, and unlike Palm Pilot it didn't fit into a niche that had already gotten itself semi-established through a long range of previous devices (e.g. Palm Pilots gave mobile computing; FreePad didn't, and was too bulky anyway). We were not the only ones by far - e.g. Ericsson had a project to produce a Linux "screen phone". A bunch of others tried laptops with rotatable screens, or more directly tablet-like devices.

So when all of the various attempt to make the PDA and tablet markets break into the mainstream failed, and the iPhone then came, a lot of us looked at it with the eyes of someone who had seen it all before and we didn't spot what made it different:

This was suddenly a mass market consumer device rather than a niche techie device. We compared it to J2ME phones and complained about too few features, rather than comparing it to the vision of what we had wanted our devices to be (which was largely Star Trek or 2001 inspired - don't let anyone suggest this class of devices were invented this recently; we never thought the idea of that type of device was new) and spot that they'd done that, but had overcome enough of the worst limitations that the hardware constraints of the first wave of these devices had to deal with and designed something that would appeal on look and feel and capabilities to end-users, rather than appeal to super-early adopters.

To me it's one of those things that have made me much more cautious about judging new tech. Especially when I catch myself thinking "that's not new" I try to force myself to look for what is new about it, because it's so easy to judge something based on flaws of past implementations rather than by what the new iteration does differently.

[I just noticed at least some of the phone numbers on the dialler screenshot in the referenced article appears to be real; and most of the people listed were working on the project at the time, including me]

[1] http://linuxdevices.org/freepad-norways-alternative-to-swede... [2] http://microwindows.org/

The console market has been teaching us that since the late 70s....

I think the mistake was in doing the same thing for Windows Phone 8 and Windows Mobile 10. Yes, you could run an app built for the old platform on the new one, but in order to do it right, you had to rewrite everything to the new frameworks, and then maintain two seperate stacks. This fragmented the already small market share into even smaller pieces.

The other big mistakes were a) not allowing other browsers, given IE and later Edge aren't the best, b) focusing Windows Mobile 10 towards flagship phones and ignoring budget phones -- where they were actually doing well with WP 7 and 8, c) not making a good release of Windows Mobile 10 until a year after launch.

If this was desktop I would agree with you. Having a good start menu makes sense and the Unity (at least usable) and then Windows 8 (abomination) show that a UI like that doesn't always make sense outside phones and tablets.

The flip of this is true as well. For a phone, my uses are far less complex. I don't have a zillion folders, apps, programming environments, mapped drives...etc. I need internet, SMS, camera, email, office apps, and that is about it. With Windows Phone I had that on my fully customized home screen with all the icons sized just the way I wanted them. I also liked that searching for apps was just slide to the right and scroll by alphabetical order. With Android there is just so much crap going on that I don't use that gets in the way. Now I'm sure some people do use it, but I do not.

My wife had a Nokia Lumia Windows phone as well. She likes the fact that there is better support and apps on Android than what we had with Windows (especially at the end), but she really misses the Windows UI and she had Android for many years before going Windows.

When Windows Phone7 came out, my friend had a budget WindowsPhone7 with a single core that outperformed dual-core Android at the time when it came to being a phone. The WP7 was a lot less laggy. Then when I got my first Windows Phone8 it was dual-core instead of the then Android quad-cores and it out performed those as well in anecdotal comparisons of mine.

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.

> 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.

An MS phone using that model would be interesting. No app store. Just go ahead and run any random app you find on the internet. Probably a security nightmare.

But MS used a similar strategy to challenge Apple once before and did really well, security issues notwithstanding. So I'm kind of surprised they didn't make the same play.

How is that?

Of course, they don't call it that, they call it "unlimited vacation."

And yes, it means exactly what you said, whatever name it goes by.

It really does show there is something sick in the culture when companies sell it and workers accept it.

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.

Either way it sounds ridiculous.

They rushed it and used Windows CE when they realized they were too far behind.