Bill Gates' biggest mistake

Bradley Prior

MyBroadband Journalist
Staff member
Super Moderator
Joined
Oct 16, 2018
Messages
5,011
Reaction score
1,581
Bill Gates' biggest mistake

At a recent event, Bill Gates revealed the biggest mistake of his career.

Gates was explaining how he believes that when developing any particular type of software, there will likely be a dominant winner in the market - such as is the case with its Windows OS for PCs.
 
Google's approach to a mobile O/S was fundamentally different and with ASOP there was/is no way MS could compete to get the O/S as prevalent as it has become.
 
Yep, mistakes were made.... now let's see what Huawei can pull out of the hat?
 
Google's approach to a mobile O/S was fundamentally different and with ASOP there was/is no way MS could compete to get the O/S as prevalent as it has become.

They should have pivoted immediately when the iPhone was announced. It was complete hubris that blinded them to seeing that Apple's OS instantly rendered Windows Mobile obsolete. But I also think there's nothing Gates could have done; he had no framework to conceptualize how he needed to shift away from the menu-based OS.
 
Well at least Windows Phone OS tried something completely different than the usual, and the OS was really well optimized towards the end.
It's just that the whole tile thing sucked balls (Although know some people who loved it).
 
I hath heard of Windows Mobile..... neva actually saw such a device though. x86 apps not working on it made it kinda pointless IMHO.
 
They should have pivoted immediately when the iPhone was announced. It was complete hubris that blinded them to seeing that Apple's OS instantly rendered Windows Mobile obsolete. But I also think there's nothing Gates could have done; he had no framework to conceptualize how he needed to shift away from the menu-based OS.

Steve Ballmer was at the helm of Microsoft at that time, and had no idea what he was doing.
 
why hasn't Microsoft tried to fight fire with fire?

make their own version of Android? and sell that to people as an alternative to ASOP
 
One size fits none, a.k.a. Windows 8.
 
I wish Microsoft stuck with Windows Phone. The general user interface had so much potential. If they released an amazing development environment like what Apple just did with Xcode, things with their app store could have been very different.

I'm not overly mad about the Android platform - it's pretty boring and very similar to iOS. I would definitely have tried out a Windows device by now had they stuck with it and provided a viable alternative.
 
You do know that MS had record profits under Steve and that it was under his watch that Azure was incubated.
Lies... That has all been satya...

And yes I know the reality... Steve did good for the company but was an easy target for ridicule
 
Will probably take them another 10 years to wake up and do it. Just like it's taken them ages to make Edge Chromium.

for a company that stole Xerox ideas for a O/S they sure take ages to jump immediately onto a great idea and copy the hell out of it.

maybe as they've made their billions, they feel they can sit back and relax.
or just that now being a huge company, its harder for them to change direction and move with the times.

theve become Xerox themselves now.
 
for a company that stole Xerox ideas for a O/S they sure take ages to jump immediately onto a great idea and copy the hell out of it.

maybe as they've made their billions, they feel they can sit back and relax.
or just that now being a huge company, its harder for them to change direction and move with the times.

theve become Xerox themselves now.
Way to show that you have zero clue about history there son.
 
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X