Bill Gates Just Confessed His Greatest Ever Mistake: He Still Hasn't Got over It | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates Just Confessed His Greatest Ever Mistake: He Still Hasn't Got over It

inc.com

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"?

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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

Yeah this article is terrible.

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.

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.

There are still so many Windows CE devices on the go it's amazing. I often see them as an inventory tool used to scan barcodes or count items it's the perfect device and it's been around forever. Stores don't want to their inventory systems if it works don't change it. And these devices on old hardware never seem to die or there is a modern supplier of the devices.

Discussion from another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251642

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.

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

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.

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