Bill G on Microsoft's biggest blunder... Was it Bing, Internet Explorer, Vista, the antitrust row? Bill Gates has said his biggest management miscalculation was failing to position Microsoft's Windows Phone as the primary rival mobile operating system to Apple's iOS. Speaking at venture capital beanfeast Village Global last week, Gates said that although the company he founded had not missed mobile phones it had gone about …
Don't know if I can bash them for Windows CE, if nothing else at least they gave it a shot.
We love bashing MS on here but truth is them entering a market has pushed that market to up it's game and yes MS then crash and burn - but without it the market would have become complacent.
I'm not sure the iPad is all that extortianate.
You can get some OK 7" Android tablets for £100-£150. But Google doesn't really seem to have put the same effort into tablets as phones, and nor have the app makers. The useable 10" Droid tablets seem to start at around the £200 mark - and the decent ones start in the £300-£400 range - which is also where the iPad starts.
So I think it's a bit of a stretch to claim they're a rip off. Particularly given they're half the price of a new iPhone, even though the screen is the most expensive bit - and the iPad one is bigger. Plus the decently specc'ed cheap droid phones seem to start around £200.
My conclusion is that phones are over-priced, especially the top-end ones.
The iPad was actually a lot cheaper than alternative slabs available at the time.
The reason Apple is the most expensive is because people refuse to pay Apple prices for something that isn’t Apple, with a very few exceptions, eg Galaxy Note before the iPhone 6+ came out.
Well, umm, there were a few more problems with Android in the times you mention, including one which persists now, or might only be ending now: The inability to get OS upgrades was as new versions were released. Considering that the updates included fixes for security issues, that one's a biggie.
Also, and probably a result rather than a cause of the fact that Android is not the market leader, accessories are quite slow to come out for Android phones. I never could get a battery case for my L6, and that's something I can't live without. So that's when I switched to iPhone.
I'd rather have Windows ME than Win-10-nic!!! [I could always code m own device drivers for ME if I wanted to... no special super-secret signing algorithm to distribute them either]
Micro-shaft's *BIGGEST* mistake took place when they abandoned the
P U R E _ S U C C E S S
of XP and 7, and
S C R E W E D _ T H E _ P O O C H
with 'windows Ape' (8.x) and the Sinofsky/Larson-Greene *ABORTION* known as "The Metro". And then, they DOUBLED DOWN ON POOCH SCREW with Win-10-nic.
However, what comes in 2nd place wiould be the ".Net Initiative" from the early 'noughties', which was the BEGINNING of Micro-shafts downfall... the '.Net' framework, C-pound, yotta yotta.
(they focused SO MUCH EFFORT into THE WRONG THINGS, and NONE OF IT into THE RIGHT THINGS, whcih would've included phones and slabs, but mostly would have IMPROVED WINDOWS 7 instead of RE-INVENTING A PILE OF EXCREMENT to REPLACE IT)
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up!
Wouldn't it have been BETTER to *NOT* screw over new computer sales, by continuing to support XP with service pack 10, as well as 7, instead of ABANDONING 7 THIS YEAR... NEW PRODUCT SALES with Windows 7 would be like a TOTAL REBOUND, but NNOOooo... they have to CONTROL THE CUSTOMER CHOICES INSTEAD.
That's right, the attitude that THEY must 'control the customers'... I would say *THAT* *ATTITUDE*, that "take over the world" mentality, to control the markets and CRUSH the competition while simultaneously releasing INFERIOR products because they essentially become a monopoly... THAT is what will ultimately bring them down!
Hi Bob, I've posted this before but maybe you missed it. Microsoft Vista arrived with baked-in DRM. So an OS that I paid for was actually spying on me and continuously checking to see if I'm a criminal.
My last MS OS was XP, I moved to Linux and you should too.
Read this article by Peter Gutmann;
https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
Your problem is you bought a Nokia. My own personal dislike of real Nokias aside the current owner of that brand is not the same company and makes cheap crap. When testing my apps I see better performance from 5 year old OnePlus & Huawei handsets than current Nokias.
Nope doesnt matter what android handset it is is, its crap compared to windows phone UX,
Live tiles were great, swipe right and browse list of installed apps just worked without the clutter of multiple home screens, swipe down on home screen for anything you pinned, and grouped icons worked so much better.
If MS still wanted to get into phones all they would have to do is port the launcher properly to android and get a few vendors to use that instead of what ever crap they come up with or the shite that google offers. Honestly switching to android feels like a massive step backwards in usability (never mind the fact i had a dock for my phone with usb and hdmi outputs years before samsung crowed about that, wireless charging and basically all of the guff which has been the headline features of the galaxy s whatever churn year on year since 2016....)
> If MS still wanted to get into phones all they would have to do is port the launcher properly to android
They already did that. Or specifically Nokia had done that with Nokia-X (Android on Nokia phone with WP8 launcher and Microsoft and Nokia services. MS continued selling these as Microsoft-X for a couple of months after they bought Nokia phone division but they outsold Lumia so had to be killed.
There is a Chinese launcher that brought the Live Tiles to Android. Probably long since dead now.
May I interest you in a OnePlus 6 that runs Windows 10 ARM? Twitter's @NTAuthority has done it, and I would rob a bank and hand over the spoils to know how the hell he did.
Microsoft is an interesting company but not one that sees the future very often. It did predict the massive adoption of DOS, BASIC and Windows (all of which were licensed from other companies or the idea copied). But since the early days they seem to have failed to predict the next big trend.
Internet - Spent years trying to catch up
Games - Had to buy DirectX to compete with other API's such as Glide (3Dfx) and PowrerVR. Then had to throw money at XBox to make it successful.
Languages - Had to copy Java to create C# (after losing a battle for Visual J++)
Smart phones and tablets - Too little, too late
In some cases, Microsoft has indeed purchased other companies in order to improve its portfolio, however several of your points are plain wrong.
Internet - Spent years trying to catch up
I'm not sure what you're getting at with this. I assume you're referring to internet browsers. Bill Gates suddenly became very excited about the potential of the internet just before the launch of Windows 95, and so Internet Explorer was included as a last minute thought. Considering the scale of the browser anti-trust lawsuits in the early 2000's due to IE's dominance in the market, I'm not sure how they can have been spending years catching up?
Games - Had to buy DirectX to compete with other API's such as Glide (3Dfx) and PowrerVR.
You miss the point with this. For starters, DirectX wasn't bought in, it was developed by Microsoft themselves. Furthermore, it wasn't to compete with Glide and PowerVR - they were both bespoke API's for their respective cards, and so any games for Windows would require the appropriate code for the specific cards. DirectX provided a single API for all developers to code for, and all video cards with the right hardware specifications and drivers for DirectX would work. It signalled the end of games that only supported one API outside of software rendering, and shifted responsibility for supporting hardware features in games from the coders to the video card manufacturers.
Then had to throw money at XBox to make it successful.
As have Atari, Nintendo, Sega and Sony. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Any console release will have an eye watering marketing budget behind it.
Languages - Had to copy Java to create C# (after losing a battle for Visual J++)
Though they were initially very similar languages, they're now quite distinct in their differences. While on the subject of languages, Microsoft have a pretty good track record with their support for both languages and developers. Right back from their early days they've been developing programming languages, and variants of existing ones, and nowadays Visual Studio is probably one of the most used IDE's around.
Smart phones and tablets - Too little, too late
They definitely got smartphones wrong, though in regards to tablets they were one of the first companies to give it a try with the Tablet PC. It wasn't a success, but you certainly can't say they failed to predict the trend. They were actually too early to market.
We all like a bit of Microsoft bashing at times, but you're going to have to try harder than this.
While I agree with you on most. MS did miss the internet, because it was not in there culture to understand a system in which the PC was not central and therefore could not be controlled by them.
They spent a lot of money making the least compatible browser out there (something we still paying for) and trying to make the PC the portal of choice, as the world started to move to online services
The internet is based around co-operative open standard. Foe long time these were just a anathema to MS, who did trust what it could not control
They were so blinkered on the PC it meant that they were slow to offer internet services, so allowed Google to grow, cloud services allowing AWS to take the market, and even mobile phones where they seen as some sort as add on to the PC and not a device in itself
That’s a bit revisionist. When it was released IE6 was the most standards-compliant browser in the world. That’s why it saw mass corporate adoption and hangs around “because if it ain’t broke why fix it”. The only people who whine are webdevs because their latest crappy framework won’t run on it. Given the choice between IE6 and JavaScript devs every sane person would choose IE6!
> IE6 was the most standards-compliant browser in the world
Only by the measurement of 'Microsoft de-facto standards'.
Actually the problem wasn't that it didn't match the standards, but that it had extensions to those standards that website developers used* and, in particular, Frontpage** generated.
* it was alleged that Microsoft paid developers to use IE specific extensions. IE 'hangs around' because of those extensions which are _not_ standard and no other browser bothers with them so either use IE6 or rewrite those in-house websites.
** Frontpage was bought in and amended by MS to generate non-standard websites to lock users into IE.
more than a bit revisionist.
to be honest, my first exposure to the internet was through MSN, during the beta test. Compuserve and AOL and others didn't have internet gateways. MSN had it right. And early on IE2 was pretty good. It didn't go bad until ActiveX was added along with VBScript [which only IE supported]
> They spent a lot of money making the least compatible browser out there
Actually they didn't. Spyglas wrote IE on the basis they would get $5.00 for every copy sold. MS gave it away and thus claimed they never sold any and didn't pay Spyglass. Spyglass sued and eventually won a settlement but had gone bankrupt by then.
Being a 'Microsoft Partner' is the kiss of death.
Nope. Gates saw people transitioning to thin clients effectively running all their business apps through a browser. He predicted this (not the only one) and knew that it might not be windows they would be running on. MS have spent considerably on providing technologies to either create or host these online platforms. We are creatures of habit (mostly) so very few people are running everything through a browser, although it is now technically possible.
One correction - DirectX wasn't created to compete with Glide and PowerVR, it was created to compete with OpenGL which already offered hardware abstraction but was also cross platform. By creating DirectX they achieved similar goals to OpenGL with the added bonus (to MS) of locking third party software further into the Windows ecosystem.
> I'm not sure what you're getting at with this.
The first edition of 'The Way Ahead' had no mention of the internet at all. This was added in later editions.
> Bill Gates suddenly became very excited about the potential of the internet just before the launch of Windows 95, and so Internet Explorer was included as a last minute thought.
That is not true at all. The first official release of Windows 95 did _not_ include the ability to access the internet but instead had the original MSN, a private network for Win95 users only, which was intended to compete with the internet.
Later there was an extra cost Plus! pack that did include internet access and several OEMs added Netscape and Trumpet Winsock. It was only later releases that Win95 included internet as standard, because they failed to gain traction with MSN.
Internet Exporer was written by Spyglass. MS agreed to pay $5.00 (or so) for every copy _sold_ and then _gave_ it away so nothing was paid to Spyglass until they sued and won.
Their initial master stroke was getting a per-machine license fee for software bundled with early IBM PCs. When someone else came up with a killer app Microsoft bought a third rate competitor, pissed on it until they liked the flavour and bundled the result with their monopolyware. The vast majority of customers could not measure quality and did not see the value in buying software that worked when they could muddle through with the rubbish that came pre-installed.
For some reason Microsoft did not follow their winning strategy with phones. They tried creating the OS themselves even though writing software is not one of their core strengths (they excel at licensing it). They did not require all new PCs to come with a bundled Microsoft phone. Using a monopoly in one field to gain a monopoly in a new one is illegal because it is so effective you can pay the fines and still make a huge profit. If Microsoft had played to their strengths we would all be waiting ten minutes for our phones to boot up and would have to end calls when the virus scanner was active.
Long boot up times and shipped with an AV...
You must be referring to Android.
Whilst I use a droid today and I'm very pleased with it, WinPho neither had nor needed an AV and its boot up times kicked the shit out of Android and even iOS at the time.
But let's not let the facts get in the way of a good MS bashing.
Which is odd, as there's a plethora of excellent criticisms you could have chosen from.
"For some reason Microsoft did not follow their winning strategy with phones."
I doubt the phone industry, manufacturers and networks alike would have allowed them. They saw the way the PC makers had been shafted and wouldn't have let that happen again.
"Smart phones and tablets - Too little, too late"
I think enough phone buyers that had a choice of platforms, purposely avoided windows on a mobile. People had had to deal with Windows at work, Windows at home, and picked something different.
"Gates said if Microsoft had got that right, it would be the leading company in the world, not just one of the leaders."
I think saying we could have been the one, had I thrown more cash at it, is wishful thinking on Mr. Gates part. I don't see how missing the boat with Windows would help with a mobile OS.
Google bought Maps, Android, Nest and many others - search is basically their only successful home grown product. If you want to know which products Google developed internally, look at those long lists of products Google has canceled. That's always the fate for stuff they come up with themselves.
Apple bought NeXT and based macOS/iOS on it, bought FingerWorks to get the capacitive touch software that made iPhone/iPad possible, bought Siri to bring the first 'assistant' to a phone.
If a company has to develop everything themselves to be successful, the only successful companies are those with a single product. As far as I can tell, it has never happened that a company with a single product anywhere near as successful as Google Search or Windows internally developed a SECOND product of similar success.
Maybe seeing the future doesn't need to take place before it happens, and being the one to recognize the potential of something that others miss and deciding to become the company that takes it from a niche where it will be forgotten is also of value. Nobody would remember Xerox's GUI if Jobs hadn't seen it, "stole" it and expanded on the idea to turn it into the modern GUI. Where would Android be today without Google? It probably wouldn't even warrant an entry on Wikipedia today, rather whatever Google bought instead of Android would likely be the dominant competitor to iPhone.
Fuschia has not been used for anything yet, so you are YEARS too early to hold it out as a success. They still have plenty of time to cancel it, or release it and have the Android world roundly reject it so it becomes a niche used only in Pixel phones.
I'd suggest that you are overlooking Apple. It had a pretty remarkable run at computers: Apple II, Macintosh, the aluminium iBook laptops (compare with the competition from Toshiba -- one is a "modern laptop" the other isn't), the iMac. All iconic.
Then there's the non-computer products. The Newton, which although failed said "this is what the future of handheld computing will look like". The iPod, which had a revolutionary user interface and content licensing which meant you didn't need to visit the dodgier side of the Internet. The iPad, which said "this is how slabs work" and has an ease of use the competition still can't touch. Then there's the iPhone -- remember that before the iPhone that Microsoft had spent years as the best smartphone, but was irretrievably blown off that perch by the third iteration of Apple's phone. Along the way were good products in markets Apple have since left: printers and cameras.
NeXT, whilst not a Apple product, was a Steve Jobs product. Designed by ex-Apple engineers.
And isn't that the real concern about the future of Apple after the death of Steve Jobs -- that without his vision and drive that Apple won't see the future and won't be able to bring its considerable design skills to the product?
I think one could argue that as the Macintosh's most important feature, its GUI, was based on tech from Xerox it wasn't solely an internally designed Apple product. And as I pointed out the iPhone wasn't solely internally developed either - they based its touch on acquired tech from Fingerworks and its OS/GUI on acquired tech from NeXT.
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They were too busy spending about a decade fucking over mobile companies who used Symbian followed by five years wrecking their own platform, with incompatibilities between major versions.
There wasn't an IBM mandating MS-DOS* in the mobile world so they couldn't take customers for granted, they had to actually sell products based on their merits and lost.
* Or, in the case of MS-DOS 1.0, a shameless bought-in CP/M rip off.
Dave Cutler and other exiles from DEC were responsible for the design of NT. I remember working at HP at the time (dates me - it was a real company and properly managed then) and complaining about the lack of NT drivers for some HP hardware (a scanner and a printer I think) and being told that HP was convinced that NT was the personal OS of the future, and HP was going to make damn sure it stayed there.
XP and 7 were decent enough, though there are some aspects of 7 I dislike [I think they BROKE the task launcher in 7 compared to XP's more sane way of doing it] and I really liked the stability of XP after it had been there for a few years.
They should've stuck with that. But I guess some arrogant 4-incher millenial types *FELT* that "it was their turn now" so everything HAD to be re-invented except it was retro back to Windows 1.0 (2D FLATSO FLATTY McFLATFACE "the Metro" CRAPPY look, bright blue on blinding white, destroying the macula of everyone who looks at it for any length of time and being UNREADABLE and EYE PAINFUL to pretty much everyone over 40) and they took away customization and added in SPYWARE and ADWARE. Booooooooooo.
I get the feeling the phone manufacturers were not keen to get on board with Microsoft supplying the OS even if they had a product that could have competed against early Android. Sure they may now regret backing the Google horse but at least if they want to they can fork Android and role there own version without Gapps. Something they wouldn't have been able to do with a MS OS.
Windows Phone was the first indicator (at least to Bill) that maybe his leadership was getting hopelessly out of touch with customer demand.
It's hard in a large mega company to be innovative, without tripping on the tail of everything and everyone you've been dragging along all those years.
Between Microsoft and the independent phone vendors, the overall mobile solution never seemed to be on the same page for very long..
"Windows Phone was the first indicator (at least to Bill) that maybe his leadership was getting hopelessly out of touch with customer demand."
Gates stepped down and gradually let go of the daily grind since 2000 or so. Perhaps for that reason?
Steve Ballmer was the CEO when Microsoft got started with the phone business, with those Pocket PC PDA's and phones. I'm sure BG monitored it all and in the end could have vetoed anything but he seemed to trust Ballmer and a missed million or billion here or there didn't matter that much.
Everyone was leery about getting into bed with them because they saw how they dominated the hardware manufacturers with Windows, and they didn't want the same fate. They ended up there anyway with Android, but at the time they believed Microsoft was much more evil than Google. Live and learn, I guess.
The few who did got burned badly. Remember Sendo? No one does, because their partnership with Microsoft bankrupted them. Nokia suffered the same fate, you only remember them because of what they used to be. Their list of other partners include has beens like Motorola, Palm, Nortel and Ericcson. The only companies that survived a mobile partnership with Microsoft are LG and Verizon, but only because mobile hardware was such a small part of their overall business.
Their other problem was they wanted so badly to tie it to Windows, and while that might be useful in the business world it was stupid and pointless for consumers. That forced a variety of dumb decisions, culminating in destroying the finally-usable GUI in Windows 7 for the abortion that was Windows 8. Google didn't have a desktop to worry about, giving them a lot of freedom to make radical changes like their quick switch from a Blackberry like device to an iPhone like device after Steve Jobs showed them the future. They were smart and realized that's where the market would go, meanwhile Steve Ballmer was laughing at iPhone and talking up the Blackberry imitating Windows Mobile.
... as he was the one who demanded against all reason that Windows CE had to have all the trappings of its desktop big brother, right down to the Start button, on devices with screens where this made absolutely no sense¹, all in the name of "preserving the Windows franchise". Apple may be overly precious about their user interface but even they realised that the user interface for a phone or tablet has to be different from that for a desktop computer. IIRC, the later versions of Windows Mobile started to fix this lossage but I think the damage has been done by then: Windows on portable devices just never felt right and the continuous chopping and changing made it clear that Microsoft themselves never considered it a priority.
(¹ We'll gloss over how Microsoft then went and did the same thing arse-backwards for Windows 8, demanding against all reason that the desktop UI had to resemble that of a tablet)
Bill... Not forcing your developers to have a "developer license" would have done it.
If you know that your software will not be runnable in ~5 years, you lose all passion.
Basically why the XNA / XBOX-Live arcade was also underwhelming.
A more open platform like Android will win over iOS. A more open platform than Android will win in the end too.
Basically, don't be controlling d*cks and the developers will follow ;)
Gate's himself admitted that he, and MS by extension, didn't have "good taste" in the way Jobs and Apple had.
In Windows we still have old and new GUI styles trying to work together, confusing end users. No style, no consistency. No class. Bit of a mess.
Google falls somewhere in-between those two when it comes to design.
.. and about last years snow.
The greatest mistake (affecting us) Gates made was not to base Windows on a *nix kernel like Xenix.
And one might add that attacking Linux was counterproductive too.
As for Nokia, why did Ballmer and what was his name prevent Nokia from marketing and produce the Linux based phone they had developed.
But why not discuss the things Gates did so well.
I would suggest the "locking in" of vendors, customers and even states, and not too shy of offering bribes.
> The greatest mistake (affecting us) Gates made was not to base Windows on a *nix kernel like Xenix.
Xenix was a multiuser system running serial 'green screen' text only terminals. Initially it ran on 8086 with a limit of one megabyte (note: _not_ gigabyte). There was _no_ graphics at the time. Also it cost several hundred dollars per machine.
When MS started writing Windows it was after DRI's GEM had been demonstrated at COMDEX running on a PC. Other graphics systems also ran on PCs.
Windows was actually written on Xenix machines but never ran there. Developers used Xenix so they could share resources.
> As for Nokia, why did Ballmer and what was his name prevent Nokia from marketing and produce the Linux based phone they had developed.
MS made Nokia cancel products that were not Windows Phone. Why is that difficult to understand? Nokia did manage to release the N8 in some countries but it outsold WP so had to be killed. Same with Nokia-X (Android) when it outsold WP.
> But why not discuss the things Gates did so well.
Vapourware to kill the competition. Contracts that prevented competition. 'Loyalty discounts' that penalised OEMs and killed competing products. Buying competitors and killing their products. Suing over marginal patents.
He did those things brilliantly.
While I agree with you I am a bit puzzled about the "Xenix was a multiuser system running serial 'green screen' text only terminals.".
What do you thing a nix* kernel does, and is supposed to do.
MS bought Xenix and Gates had plans but went for the quick and dirty.
Perhaps, then again, his best decision, personally.
At least he got the money while we got the landfill.
> While I agree with you I am a bit puzzled about the "Xenix was a multiuser system running serial 'green screen' text only terminals.".
What puzzles you? Are you puzzled about what 'multiuser' is or what 'green screen terminals' are?
I was illustrating why Xenix was not suitable for running Windows (in 1982).
Later, serial graphics terminals did become available, and I have run Windows 3.11 on multiuser systems.
A nix* kernel doesn't incorporate a graphical user interface, that part is done on top of the kernel.
The choice Gates had was to write Windows on top of a nix* kernel like Xenix, that would have created a very different Windows. To quote MS "the company stated in 1981.[8] Microsoft referred to its own MS-DOS as its "single-user, single-tasking operating s ystem",[31] and advised customers that wanted multiuser or multitasking support to buy Xenix".
In fact such a Windows would have become very similar to any Linux distro, a nix* kernel with the GUI like Gnome or KDE or ..., but be called Windows. Such a Windows would compete with Linux on supercomputers.
I don't want to sound rude or something but I started programming before Gates and Jobs and I have been able to live the history of both Windows and Unix and older stuff.
We are where we are and things happened for various reasons, now in the past, but that doesn't stop us from playing with the "what if ..".
*
> A nix* kernel doesn't incorporate a graphical user interface, that part is done on top of the kernel.
And so was the original Windows (and GEM). In fact Windows 1 could be used as a set of libraries that could be linked into a program by the developer so that it could run on MS-DOS without Windows installed. GEM could do the same.
> The choice Gates had was to write Windows on top of a nix* kernel like Xenix,
That would not have been a sensible choice for many reasons, the main one being that 'green screen terminals' couldn't do graphics. While later *nix did do graphics they relied on X11 or similar which was l years later. Xenix was also an expensive option that required royalties to be paid to AT&T, too expensive to reduce it to single user on a machine with built in graphics capability, such as the relatively cheap IBM PC.
Also he wanted to compete against Apple II and Mac, DRI's GEM, and other small machine rather than going upmarket to workstation class machines such as Star or PERQ which had limited market potential. As he didn't build hardware (except Z80 Softcard) he needed to sell lots of copies to make a profit.
> a nix* kernel with the GUI like Gnome or KDE
Actual Unix had these before Linux did with CDE that was built on X11 and Motif. If MS built hardware it may have gone down that route so that it could sell expensive machines and X-terminals and make a profit from the hardware like the CDE developers (IBM, HP, ...) wanted to do.
Xenix on 8086 (or even 80286) wasn't powerful enough to do workstation or multiuser graphics, and was too expensive to do single-user, and was too big to fit on a cheap(ish) IBM-PC. It just wasn't an option that would make a profit for MS.
> I don't want to sound rude or something but I started programming before Gates and Jobs
Be rude for all I care. I started in the 60s and still have machines here in my basement from the mid 70s through to the present day.
> Microsoft referred to its own MS-DOS as its "single-user, ...
When NT was being written it was initially designed as a multiuser system, just as Cutler's Prism had been. Gates told them to remove this because he didn't want to sell one copy to be shared by several users, he wanted to sell a copy to every user.
Later he 'stole' Citrix's multiuser add on to creatre TSE on the basis that he could sell a copy for each user's client machines and _also_ sell a multiuser TSE for the server(s).
It is all about how much revenue can be sucked from his customers.
I don't see what Bill Gates is bitching about because it's not too late. That much of Android is Open Source is a threat to Google and an opportunity for Microsoft because they could run Android apps through a compatibility layer on their own Android-like OS; given the CPU grunt available on flagships these days, users won't see too much of a drop in speed. Get on with it Bill.
p.s. I hate Microsoft and hope Bill doesn't do this.
p.p.s. Satya, selling Nokia was a dumb move.
p.p.p.s. NEVER 10!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
> p.p.s. Satya, selling Nokia was a dumb move.
It was only the phone division that was sold to MS.
It had made a loss every quarter in spite of MS giving it a billion a year (or up to ..)
MS gave them 7 billion for it (wasn't it?).
What was dumb was agreeing to MS's contract to make Windows Phones. The rest followed from that.
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