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Even the greatest visionaries sometimes make mistakes, as in the case of Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft. He recently admitted that, because of him, the Redmond firm had completely missed out on a market that is now unavoidable.
While Microsoft continues to reign supreme in the PC market with its Windows operating system, the company is completely absent from the smartphone market. And yet it did try to carve out a niche for itself in this sector when it was still in its infancy, with its Windows Mobile OS and then Windows Phone. In 2010, Windows Phone seemed to be the ideal challenger to Android and iOS. But it never caught on, and Microsoft finally threw in the towel in 2017.
“Microsoft’s “biggest mistake
Until now, Bill Gates had never really broached the subject publicly. But some time ago, the billionaire gave an interview to Julia Hartz, CEO of Eventbrite. And he didn’t beat about the bush: for him, the way in which the Windows Phone issue is being handled is “the biggest mistake” made by Microsoft, but it’s mostly his own. “The biggest mistake of all time is the mismanagement I got myself into, which led to Microsoft not being what Android is,” he said.
The fact is that Bill Gates underestimated Google on this point, but above all he overestimated Microsoft, believing that a company with such a strong foothold in the operating systems sector could never lose in such a market. And yet, history has proved otherwise. “Today, Android is the standard platform for non-Apple smartphones. It’s really a winner-takes-all market. If you have half as many applications or even 90% of the number of applications, you’re on the road to total disaster. There’s only room for one non-Apple operating system, and how much is that worth – $400 billion that could have been transferred from company G to company M.”
The blunt opinion of Android’s co-founder
Bill Gates’ statements have not failed to provoke a reaction from Rich Miner, the co-founder of Android. “I literally helped create Android to prevent Microsoft from controlling the smartphone as they did the PC, which helped stifle innovation. So it’s always amusing for me to hear Gates complain about the loss of mobile to Android,” he said in a post on X. He went on to reveal that he had worked with Orange on the launch of the first Windows Mobile handset, released in 2002, and that it was from there that he decided to work on Android in order to create “something more open”. “Sorry Bill, but you’re more responsible for the $400 billion loss than you think,” he quips.
The story might have been different if Microsoft had managed to come up with a convincing and unifying product earlier. If that had been the case, perhaps the Apple iPhone would not have been the device that paved the way for the smartphone market. We’ll never know. What is certain is that after the failure of Windows Phone, Microsoft, like a scalded cat, dropped the ball. And with hindsight, it may not have been such a bad idea…
