What I find interesting is that he still doesn’t realize that because Microsoft was dominant in specific plays (desktop OSes, productivity software, e-mail clients) it was precluded by internal culture from innovating on mobile.
Their success blinded them to the fact that mobile and tablets comprised a completely different functional and experiential environment, and so they kept pushing a “Windows everywhere, Outlook everywhere” strategy that failed to create a smartphone market they initially owned, failed to take advantage of the business mobile market Blackberry created, failed to take advantage of the premium consumer mobile market Apple created, and failed to take advantage of the mass consumer mobile market Android created (despite their last bite at the mobile OS apple — so to speak — being quite good).
Nothing breeds failure quite like success even, evidently, in hindsight.
Exactly right. Microsoft was profoundly ahead of the curve! They were pushing their tablet/slate stuff 5+ years before the iPhone and iPad. Their key mistake was attempting to leverage Windows, which forced an awkward stylus mode driving a shoehorned desktop OS.
Apple blindsided them with a better cellphone instead of a worse computer, and so it slotted in naturally
Microsoft could only conceive of Windows devices. Apple's big idea was to not make the iPhone a Mac. If anything, they overcorrected, dragged kicking and screaming into allowing apps at all.
>In fact, Gates is still kicking himself for taking his eyes off the ball and allowing Google to develop Android, the “standard non-Apple phone form platform,” as he describes it. “That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win.”
Not without Satya Nadella's Microsoft, who knows how to exploit open-source ecosystem. Even if Steve Ballmer had bought Android instead of Google, Microsoft would have sold it to manufacturers at premium without letting them to innovate upon it(Like they did with Windows Mobile/Phone OS). So android under Pre-Nadella would have failed anyways.
So Bill Gates, take it easy; android under Microsoft wouldn't have become a reality due to the seeds you sowed in the Microsoft's Philosophy. But things are changing thanks to extraordinary overhaul of Satya Nadella.
Microsoft's previous success didn't just cripple their smartphone OS development - it also damaged their sales.
Handset manufacturers like Samsung could see the exorbitant 'Windows tax' that ate into the profit margin of every desktop PC, so they would have preferred open-source Android to closed-source Windows Mobile even if both were free.
It turned out that Android could lock in the manufacturers with Google Play services built on top of an open-source platform - but this was not something that Microsoft executives considered at the time.
It's been barely any time at all since they gave up pushing that "We're calling our x86-64 OS and our ARM laptop/tablet OS and our ARM phone OS the same thing because they're the same system" horseshit. It may look like Windows 10 but none of the drivers work, half the x86 programs don't run, and the ones that do run make you feel like you're using a Transmeta CPU from 2002.
Great point. Also let's not forget Microsoft messed up the browser game too. Internet explorer was a colossal catch up game to Netscape... And they were off by a few years here and never able to catch up.
I'm also surprised Gates is so hard on himself about Android.
I think most companies do this, even ones that aren't that successful. If you've got a product that has any modicum of success at any point, the natural inclination is to push and mold that product into every corner of every space you're in. Any employee that spends time on anything else is not pulling their weight in the company.
> What I find interesting is that he still doesn’t realize that because Microsoft was dominant in specific plays
I think he knows that since he said in one interview back in the 90s that he is worried about 2 guys working in a garage coming up with a product that would disrupt MS.
Somehow nobody really seems to acknowledge the real reason Android won to my mind: that it was open source. Not for end users, but for OEMs. The whole reason they were willing to unify on Android as a platform was that it allowed hardware differentiation and innovation in a way that Windows Phone didn't, because they could actually create their own features and add them to the OS. So of course the best hardware and the most unique features and the biggest marketing budget and most aggressive carrier deals were always going to come on Android first. Because Windows Phone nullified part of the reason for OEMs to exist in the first place. Microsoft tried to control too much of the market, I assume out of Apple-envy - something they didn't even do with windows. I don't know why they expected it to work.
You’re right. That said, I am still so sad about Windows Phone going away. To my mind, it is still one of the best Smartphone UX that has yet existed, bested only by voice/passive-screen Moto X 2013.
The vision for Windows Phone was unified information, screen-time minimalism, and the most brilliant sound/rumble design I have experienced on any device. The Moto X was a close second by finding ways to avoid needing to look at your screen entirely. By contrast, Apple and Samsung have been focused on screen-addiction, not user efficiency/productivity. iOS Screen Time is the weirdest mea culpa, but works because efficient mobile experiences failed to sell.
Yeah, I think that the example of what happened to PC makers' profits after Microsoft became the definition of PC instead of IBM-compatible, was pretty informative to the phone companies. They didn't have to be too tech-savvy to see that they didn't want to have PC makers' kind of profit margin, and Microsoft above all was the company that they would be suspicious of.
The reason they were willing to unify on Android was because it was free - not because it was open source. As you can see with all of the crapware that PC OEMs put on Windows computers, it being open source had nothing to do with it - at least outside of China.
What makes Android,Android to most users is all of the closed source Google Services.
I don't think your argument works. The license is not relevant.. you need an API layer that allow customization via OS hooks, drivers and apps. Also, even if you had a closed source license, there is no reason you cannot share it with your partners.
Microsoft could have bought Android before Google though. But I guess that's part of the point. Microsoft of that era was too arrogant and Windows focused to consider such a thing.
Yeah, I wonder if it would have been different if, in the early days of Android (or post-iOS and pre-Android) Microsoft has released not just a mobile OS, but a flagship-quality reference design like what Google has done with its own phones. I think MS kind of tried that with Nokia, but the ship had already sailed by that point.
> In fact, Gates is still kicking himself for taking his eyes off the ball and allowing Google to develop Android, the “standard non-Apple phone form platform,” as he describes it. “That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win.”
That seems very out of touch, bordering on historic revisionism. Microsoft developed an OS for mobile devices and embedded use since around the mid 1990's, with a feverish desperation.
Mobile-Internet-capable devices running Windows CE already existed at the time Google was just starting up. I worked on these damn things that time, doing mobile networking!
Phones running Windows Mobile existed years before smartphones.
Microsoft had more than a decade head start over Google and arguably had their eyes squarely fixated on some sort of ball the whole time. It was perhaps the wrong ball.
The problem with the idea that it was "a natural thing for Microsoft to win" is that it basically means this: "Microsoft won the PC desktop with a garbage operating system, and so it is natural that Microsoft can go on to win in any area by flogging another garbage operating system".
As if it were a matter of something resembling imperial succession? The platform dominance throne "naturally" belongs to none other than the future progeny of Microsoft by divine birthright?
In reality, it's just luck, timing and various economic factors. Now Google dominates with their garbage platform.
Yeah, I used to think that things will crash and burn if I disappear for a week when I was younger. Truth is, not only do things not crash and burn, they in fact barely change at all if I go on a 2-3 week vacation. You think the company will land on the moon by the time you return, and then you get back and it's the same shit, barely anything has changed.
Nowadays, though, my friends at MS say that it's one of the best large employers to work for in terms of work life balance. They don't pay the top dollar, but there are many people who would gladly trade that for the work environment in which they can also have a life.
Back in the 90's, I thought about small computers, maybe even handhelds. But I never connected that thought with a phone.
It just seems so thunderingly obvious today.
Makes me wonder what connection I'm not making today.
It's like when Henry Ford said if he'd asked what people wanted, they'd want "a faster horse". We're all constrained by what we're used to thinking about, and simply improving what we're already used to.
It was just timing, really. MS invested a lot in PDAs, at a time when the tech just wasn’t good enough. The screens were bad, you had to use styluses, memory was low, batteries would deplete in a few hours, cameras and GPS were too big to even consider shipping... it was a niche market for a certain type of business user, and that was it. Those PDAs did much better than the Apple Newton, but didn’t break into the mainstream.
Then technology improved, Apple made some smart acquisitions, and changed the UI game enough to become popular. It made Windows CE (and its competitors like Symbian) look terribly dated. MS fumbled their response not once, not twice, but three times: first they tried doubling down on what they had, then they rewrote from scratch, then they rewrote from scratch again. By the time they found a good balance, it was all over.
Meanwhile, Google was actually going through the early-MS playbook pretty religiously: get something that already exists, improve and rebadge it, then give it away as free to the consumer (which MS did with oem deals and piracy tolerance), effectively commoditizing it. Spread it far and wide until it becomes the platform, then leverage your ecosystem hegemony to achieve your true cashflow aims with higher-level tooling and apps. Massive availability made it the easy choice for oems, developers, and hobbyists/evangelists alike, turning the mobile OS in a commodity while competitors were still very determined to make a buck on it. This is what MS had done to hardware manufacturers in the ‘90s, and it’s extraordinary how they failed to see the parallels until it was too late. Or maybe not - after all, MS by then was the new IBM.
Back in the 90s, small computers with phone capabilities were already being sold, starting with the IBM Simon. It even used a touchscreen instead of buttons.
If you ignore the path dependency it is not. The smartphones are mostly computers with phone functionality being a vestigial feature.
An alternate history might have consisted of laptops shrinking to tablets and then "micro-tablets" or something which don't have a phone functionality (data plans only) and the calls would happen over IP.
By the mid-2000s it was a fun mix: Palm in the hands, which dials the number on the phone strapped to your belt, with sound going to a headset. So the following merger was quite natural.
The interface on Palm or WinCE also had cues of iPhone. The main thing to divine, aside from the finger-pointing, was that people didn't really like to aim at 3mm*3mm targets.
- communication in relation to computing: half of computing early history was digital communication (telegraph)
- phones were just the seed: we don't really have phones, we have pocket computers with vestigial microphone tail. Phones were just the pivot to a new market.
my 0.02cents
ps: "Makes me wonder what connection I'm not making today." I'm curious if there still are connections to make. Not wanting to sound jaded or grim; but I feel we're at the end of a technological cycle. We have too much if I may phrase it like that, at least on the digital electronics. Maybe surprises will come elsewhere: say a blend of ubiquitious local assisted manufacturing on top of a different financial layer (spin off from the crypto idea) ?
What happened is that thanks to miniaturization, devices of a similar form factor were combined. The camera, GPS, phone, music player, and so on are can now fit in device.
There was an element of timing too. For example, the cell phone camera didn't replace the standalone digital camera until it was "good enough".
A similar trend is bound to happen with tablet form devices. We've got laptops, e-readers, and tablets.
There's no reason we should be lugging around all 3 if a tablet-like device can be made light and versatile enough. This device will probably have internet with built in SIM cards.
I don't really understand what Bill Gates is getting at here.
Back in 2010, Android was still very clunky and sluggish. Windows Phone was sleek and fast. Both OSes allowed you to install developer tools and write software for free.
However, there's 2 differences that no one calls out! First, Android used Java as a way to leverage 15 years of software. Windows Phone v1 was c# only and back in 2010 no one except Stack Overflow was writing anything other than enterprise software in C#. So you literally had to write 95% of your software from the ground up.
Second, instead of quickly catching up, feature for feature with Apple and Android, only 2 years behind at the start, they stopped, not once, but two times to re-write their Phone OS still using the original feature set from 2010.
They should have 1, BENT over BACKWARDS to get every API they could and ship C++ and Java compilers. Talk to developers about what they needed to get their software written. In 2010 and 2011 there were hundreds of developers at every company that would have loved a small 20% project to bring up their software on a Windows Phone. Yet with it only allowing C#, it would have required developers 80% of their time and that was just not a reality.
Second, they should have continually added features and more features, and innovated on features that no one else had. 2010 still had a lot of room for owning the narrative of what a mobile device could be.
I don't know about you, but it frustrates me that they don't own up to their actual mistakes. It's not about the lack of companies building the apps, it's that whoever managed that Phone project was incompetent and mismanaged the whole thing. They treated it like just another 9 to 5 job with little expressed passion for winning.
Objective C wasn't really a big thing before the iPhone. I know MacOS used it but its not like it had the rich open source community that Java had, and most iOS developers were learning it for the first time. I think this failure wasn't about programming languages; if the platform had succeeded then C# would have been just that much more popular.
I have to question how important the choice of language is.
Nobody[+] was writing Objective-C before the iOS SDK came but that didn’t stunt its popularity.
Google ended up writing their own Java runtime and ended up getting in a messy fight with Oracle over it.
Microsoft had their own developer platform (arguably better than anything the Android ecosystem had to offer) so it made total sense to capitalise on it.
The iPhone taught us that however obscure or bad your ecosystem is, developers will come to your platform if demand is there.
[+] (obviously Mac developers were writing Objective C - I’m unfairly rounding that down to “nobody”)
> back in 2010 no one except Stack Overflow was writing anything other than enterprise software in C#. So you literally had to write 95% of your software from the ground up.
C# was well established by 2010. The TIOBE Index lists it as the 6th most popular back in 2004. Meanwhile Objective-C was only the 34th most popular in 2009. Java was only released 6 years before C#.
There were C# libraries for pretty much everything by 2010. I think you're mixing it up with an earlier date.
Backwards compatibility and portability is not a strength for mobile devices in 2010. Existing UX paradigms don't translate, apps have to be written around the constraints of the device, etc. Apple went clean slate, and look at how that worked for them.
First, Android used Java as a way to leverage 15 years of software. Windows Phone v1 was c# only and back in 2010 no one except Stack Overflow was writing anything other than enterprise software in C#.
This is so horribly out of touch I don’t know where to start.
It really is winner take all ... There’s room for exactly one non-Apple operating system, and what’s that worth? $400 billion that would be transferred from company G [Google] to company M [Microsoft]. -- Bill Gates
Who'd have known in 2011 that by 2019, The Four Greatest Companies in the world (by cap) would be All-America [1], Microsoft would be back on top, and then combined together, they spell MAGA -- in almost perfect order too [2]...
Symbol Company Cap Rank
M MSFT Microsoft 1.05 T 1
A AMZN Amazon.com 940.99 B 2
G GOOG Alphabet 779.39 B 4
A AAPL Apple 914.60 B 3
Bill always suffered from "NIH" (Not Invented Here) Syndrome.
Google took something that worked (Linux) and prettied up the User Interface. Apple had pretty much done the same sort of thing earlier with BSD UNIX and OSX. Bill was ideologically opposed to Linux right from the start because it was Open Source.
Consequently, Microsoft had to do 10 times the work to achieve success that Google needed to. Google was up and running while Microsoft was still struggling along to get things to work.
That's probably the main reason that Google dominates smartphones and Microsoft doesn't.
I'm a Linux fanboy that hates desktop Windows with a passion.
However, both I and everyone I know that has ever used a Windows phone (there were several of us at work) absolutely loved the platform when compared to Android and iPhone. I'm running a top end Google phone and still missing my Nokia Lumia Windows Phone. That phone had a great OS and was Rock solid.
The problem was nobody wanted to give it a try. The hardware looked bad, but it honestly didn't need to be as good as Android as it wasn't as bloated. This is somewhat anecdotal, but dual core Windows Phone7 ran smoother than quad core Android at the time.
I thought in 2007 and I still think today the fundamental reason why there was space for the iPhone to be the phenomenon it was is that
1) The success of the iPod let them dictate terms to AT&T and get subsidies no one else could while keeping the customer experience clean in a way competitors couldn't (US phones had an unbelievable amount of crapware in the mid 00s, including great ideas like flashing the firmware to prevent camera phones from transferring photos over USB and forcing you to use a carrier service that covost $1/photo)
2) Microsoft's antitrust hangover prevented their mobile department from strong arming carriers earlier on
Microsoft's real mistake post iPhone release (and definitely post Android release) was not immediately making Windows phone free, OSS would have been nice, but I think most manufacturers moved to Android as their flagship because they got it free.
> You know, in the software world, in particular for platforms, these are winner-take-all markets. 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.
Perfectly in character for Gates to see the mistake as failure to enter the market with the copycat product rather than the product that creates an entirely new category.
I suppose the world needs people like this, but by golly there's no reason for them to get any more than acknowledgement for being one of many players.
If Microsoft had a history of doing things right consistently in the copycat position, that might be different. But as a generally mediocre player wielding a monopoly position to follow the technological lead of others Microsoft is really quite uninspiring.
I think one of his biggest mistakes was fighting so hard against the DoJ wanting to break up the company into separate App and Sys companies -- not that the lawsuit was justified (and being all but moot by the time it was settled), but that it would have been a good thing for the company, forcing more healthy and creative interactions and acting as a new model for 3rd-party interaction.
As noted, MS was early to research and market in several areas including tablets and mobile, but either lacked a creativity escape velocity or quit just before hardware was up to the task, then failing at a restart. As someone who has spent their early career creating voice recognition products, it's also frustrating that they were so far ahead with speech reco (hiring the CMU peeps, many versions of SAPI, etc.) and then totally failing to do anything interesting with it at the OS and app level. If not mobile, MS should have been first for in-home voice assistant devices. (My and others' protestations for multi-modal or voice-only devices landed on deaf ears.)
As for Windows Phone, not allowing Silverlight apps to load/run on it from the web was a horrible decision, as this would have allowed u/x experiences that were years away from happening in the mobile browser.
Personally, I miss the T-Mobile Sidekick and the Blackberry Curve devices -- really all you need is Select, ExecuteThis and ContextMenuThis to do everything -- I was disappointed when Android gave up on the context menu. However, Android is still leagues better than iOS where every app is an adventure game.
[disclaimer: my first stint at MS was during the aforementioned time from '90-95.)
I briefly had a Nokia Lumia 920 running Windows 8 Mobile, and I loved it... except for the apps. I otherwise really liked the device, the UI, the overall user experience. It was a nice alternative to the multiple iPhones I'd owned up to that point.
I've now been an Android user (Nexus 5, Moto X Pure, Nokia 6.1 Plus) for a few years. I've never been quite satisfied with the platform and the various quirks of the phones I've owned. Everytime the iPhone SE's make their way back to Apple's refurb site I almost purchase one for myself and my wife. I wish Windows Mobile had managed to generate enough interest and gravity to sustain as a viable alternative.
That’s a bit like saying “I wish I had had the idea for a search engine before Google, then I would have been the next Google.” It doesn’t work like that in business.
You could have given Microsoft everything they needed to dominate in mobile and they still would have screwed it up because of the Microsoft mentality back then. Even after iPhone came out, Ballmer famously said iPhones were stupid.
Everybody eventually will make a graveyard mistake as you really just can't win all the time. It's just part of the cycle isn't it? Steve Ballmer was on the path to destroy Microsoft, and they were very lucky to have found Satya Nadella before it became all too late. He's truly their savior.
[+] [-] HillRat|6 years ago|reply
Their success blinded them to the fact that mobile and tablets comprised a completely different functional and experiential environment, and so they kept pushing a “Windows everywhere, Outlook everywhere” strategy that failed to create a smartphone market they initially owned, failed to take advantage of the business mobile market Blackberry created, failed to take advantage of the premium consumer mobile market Apple created, and failed to take advantage of the mass consumer mobile market Android created (despite their last bite at the mobile OS apple — so to speak — being quite good).
Nothing breeds failure quite like success even, evidently, in hindsight.
[+] [-] millstone|6 years ago|reply
Apple blindsided them with a better cellphone instead of a worse computer, and so it slotted in naturally
Microsoft could only conceive of Windows devices. Apple's big idea was to not make the iPhone a Mac. If anything, they overcorrected, dragged kicking and screaming into allowing apps at all.
[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|6 years ago|reply
Not without Satya Nadella's Microsoft, who knows how to exploit open-source ecosystem. Even if Steve Ballmer had bought Android instead of Google, Microsoft would have sold it to manufacturers at premium without letting them to innovate upon it(Like they did with Windows Mobile/Phone OS). So android under Pre-Nadella would have failed anyways.
So Bill Gates, take it easy; android under Microsoft wouldn't have become a reality due to the seeds you sowed in the Microsoft's Philosophy. But things are changing thanks to extraordinary overhaul of Satya Nadella.
[+] [-] thomasmarriott|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#The_Road_Ahead_(199...
[+] [-] jessewmc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkeydreams|6 years ago|reply
Great empires are never brought down by their failings, it is their successes which do them in.
[+] [-] MarkMc|6 years ago|reply
Handset manufacturers like Samsung could see the exorbitant 'Windows tax' that ate into the profit margin of every desktop PC, so they would have preferred open-source Android to closed-source Windows Mobile even if both were free.
It turned out that Android could lock in the manufacturers with Google Play services built on top of an open-source platform - but this was not something that Microsoft executives considered at the time.
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonu|6 years ago|reply
I'm also surprised Gates is so hard on himself about Android.
[+] [-] Lendal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sumedh|6 years ago|reply
I think he knows that since he said in one interview back in the 90s that he is worried about 2 guys working in a garage coming up with a product that would disrupt MS.
[+] [-] zmmmmm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IggleSniggle|6 years ago|reply
The vision for Windows Phone was unified information, screen-time minimalism, and the most brilliant sound/rumble design I have experienced on any device. The Moto X was a close second by finding ways to avoid needing to look at your screen entirely. By contrast, Apple and Samsung have been focused on screen-addiction, not user efficiency/productivity. iOS Screen Time is the weirdest mea culpa, but works because efficient mobile experiences failed to sell.
[+] [-] rossdavidh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarface74|6 years ago|reply
What makes Android,Android to most users is all of the closed source Google Services.
[+] [-] la_barba|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlivar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ineedasername|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blub|6 years ago|reply
It won because it was free for OEMs and it was subsidized by Google's clout and billions.
Google destroyed the market for mobile OSes, like they typically do with their predatory pricing.
[+] [-] kazinator|6 years ago|reply
That seems very out of touch, bordering on historic revisionism. Microsoft developed an OS for mobile devices and embedded use since around the mid 1990's, with a feverish desperation.
Mobile-Internet-capable devices running Windows CE already existed at the time Google was just starting up. I worked on these damn things that time, doing mobile networking!
Phones running Windows Mobile existed years before smartphones.
Microsoft had more than a decade head start over Google and arguably had their eyes squarely fixated on some sort of ball the whole time. It was perhaps the wrong ball.
The problem with the idea that it was "a natural thing for Microsoft to win" is that it basically means this: "Microsoft won the PC desktop with a garbage operating system, and so it is natural that Microsoft can go on to win in any area by flogging another garbage operating system".
As if it were a matter of something resembling imperial succession? The platform dominance throne "naturally" belongs to none other than the future progeny of Microsoft by divine birthright?
In reality, it's just luck, timing and various economic factors. Now Google dominates with their garbage platform.
[+] [-] m0zg|6 years ago|reply
Nowadays, though, my friends at MS say that it's one of the best large employers to work for in terms of work life balance. They don't pay the top dollar, but there are many people who would gladly trade that for the work environment in which they can also have a life.
[+] [-] WalterBright|6 years ago|reply
It just seems so thunderingly obvious today.
Makes me wonder what connection I'm not making today.
It's like when Henry Ford said if he'd asked what people wanted, they'd want "a faster horse". We're all constrained by what we're used to thinking about, and simply improving what we're already used to.
[+] [-] toyg|6 years ago|reply
Then technology improved, Apple made some smart acquisitions, and changed the UI game enough to become popular. It made Windows CE (and its competitors like Symbian) look terribly dated. MS fumbled their response not once, not twice, but three times: first they tried doubling down on what they had, then they rewrote from scratch, then they rewrote from scratch again. By the time they found a good balance, it was all over.
Meanwhile, Google was actually going through the early-MS playbook pretty religiously: get something that already exists, improve and rebadge it, then give it away as free to the consumer (which MS did with oem deals and piracy tolerance), effectively commoditizing it. Spread it far and wide until it becomes the platform, then leverage your ecosystem hegemony to achieve your true cashflow aims with higher-level tooling and apps. Massive availability made it the easy choice for oems, developers, and hobbyists/evangelists alike, turning the mobile OS in a commodity while competitors were still very determined to make a buck on it. This is what MS had done to hardware manufacturers in the ‘90s, and it’s extraordinary how they failed to see the parallels until it was too late. Or maybe not - after all, MS by then was the new IBM.
[+] [-] opo|6 years ago|reply
>...We're all constrained by what we're used to thinking about, and simply improving what we're already used to.
But, in regards to:
>...It's like when Henry Ford said if he'd asked what people wanted, they'd want "a faster horse".
There is no real evidence that Ford ever said that quote.
https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast
[+] [-] icebraining|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the8472|6 years ago|reply
If you ignore the path dependency it is not. The smartphones are mostly computers with phone functionality being a vestigial feature.
An alternate history might have consisted of laptops shrinking to tablets and then "micro-tablets" or something which don't have a phone functionality (data plans only) and the calls would happen over IP.
[+] [-] aasasd|6 years ago|reply
The interface on Palm or WinCE also had cues of iPhone. The main thing to divine, aside from the finger-pointing, was that people didn't really like to aim at 3mm*3mm targets.
[+] [-] agumonkey|6 years ago|reply
- communication in relation to computing: half of computing early history was digital communication (telegraph)
- phones were just the seed: we don't really have phones, we have pocket computers with vestigial microphone tail. Phones were just the pivot to a new market.
my 0.02cents
ps: "Makes me wonder what connection I'm not making today." I'm curious if there still are connections to make. Not wanting to sound jaded or grim; but I feel we're at the end of a technological cycle. We have too much if I may phrase it like that, at least on the digital electronics. Maybe surprises will come elsewhere: say a blend of ubiquitious local assisted manufacturing on top of a different financial layer (spin off from the crypto idea) ?
[+] [-] vendiddy|6 years ago|reply
There was an element of timing too. For example, the cell phone camera didn't replace the standalone digital camera until it was "good enough".
A similar trend is bound to happen with tablet form devices. We've got laptops, e-readers, and tablets.
There's no reason we should be lugging around all 3 if a tablet-like device can be made light and versatile enough. This device will probably have internet with built in SIM cards.
[+] [-] jarjoura|6 years ago|reply
Back in 2010, Android was still very clunky and sluggish. Windows Phone was sleek and fast. Both OSes allowed you to install developer tools and write software for free.
However, there's 2 differences that no one calls out! First, Android used Java as a way to leverage 15 years of software. Windows Phone v1 was c# only and back in 2010 no one except Stack Overflow was writing anything other than enterprise software in C#. So you literally had to write 95% of your software from the ground up.
Second, instead of quickly catching up, feature for feature with Apple and Android, only 2 years behind at the start, they stopped, not once, but two times to re-write their Phone OS still using the original feature set from 2010.
They should have 1, BENT over BACKWARDS to get every API they could and ship C++ and Java compilers. Talk to developers about what they needed to get their software written. In 2010 and 2011 there were hundreds of developers at every company that would have loved a small 20% project to bring up their software on a Windows Phone. Yet with it only allowing C#, it would have required developers 80% of their time and that was just not a reality.
Second, they should have continually added features and more features, and innovated on features that no one else had. 2010 still had a lot of room for owning the narrative of what a mobile device could be.
I don't know about you, but it frustrates me that they don't own up to their actual mistakes. It's not about the lack of companies building the apps, it's that whoever managed that Phone project was incompetent and mismanaged the whole thing. They treated it like just another 9 to 5 job with little expressed passion for winning.
[+] [-] jeremyjh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] statictype|6 years ago|reply
Nobody[+] was writing Objective-C before the iOS SDK came but that didn’t stunt its popularity.
Google ended up writing their own Java runtime and ended up getting in a messy fight with Oracle over it.
Microsoft had their own developer platform (arguably better than anything the Android ecosystem had to offer) so it made total sense to capitalise on it.
The iPhone taught us that however obscure or bad your ecosystem is, developers will come to your platform if demand is there.
[+] (obviously Mac developers were writing Objective C - I’m unfairly rounding that down to “nobody”)
[+] [-] nearbuy|6 years ago|reply
C# was well established by 2010. The TIOBE Index lists it as the 6th most popular back in 2004. Meanwhile Objective-C was only the 34th most popular in 2009. Java was only released 6 years before C#.
There were C# libraries for pretty much everything by 2010. I think you're mixing it up with an earlier date.
[+] [-] underwater|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarface74|6 years ago|reply
This is so horribly out of touch I don’t know where to start.
[+] [-] espeed|6 years ago|reply
Who'd have known in 2011 that by 2019, The Four Greatest Companies in the world (by cap) would be All-America [1], Microsoft would be back on top, and then combined together, they spell MAGA -- in almost perfect order too [2]...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-America[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again#Socia...
[+] [-] simonblack|6 years ago|reply
Google took something that worked (Linux) and prettied up the User Interface. Apple had pretty much done the same sort of thing earlier with BSD UNIX and OSX. Bill was ideologically opposed to Linux right from the start because it was Open Source.
Consequently, Microsoft had to do 10 times the work to achieve success that Google needed to. Google was up and running while Microsoft was still struggling along to get things to work.
That's probably the main reason that Google dominates smartphones and Microsoft doesn't.
[+] [-] 6thaccount2|6 years ago|reply
However, both I and everyone I know that has ever used a Windows phone (there were several of us at work) absolutely loved the platform when compared to Android and iPhone. I'm running a top end Google phone and still missing my Nokia Lumia Windows Phone. That phone had a great OS and was Rock solid.
The problem was nobody wanted to give it a try. The hardware looked bad, but it honestly didn't need to be as good as Android as it wasn't as bloated. This is somewhat anecdotal, but dual core Windows Phone7 ran smoother than quad core Android at the time.
[+] [-] nine_k|6 years ago|reply
Lumia hardware was good, and the camera was more than excellent. Software was lacking but it could be improved to maturity.
Too bad we now have two players and not three or four (blackberry). This is indeed not because of lack of engineering prowess or customer interest.
[+] [-] topkai22|6 years ago|reply
Microsoft's real mistake post iPhone release (and definitely post Android release) was not immediately making Windows phone free, OSS would have been nice, but I think most manufacturers moved to Android as their flagship because they got it free.
[+] [-] CPLX|6 years ago|reply
The world would not be a better place if MS had overwhelming mobile market share or had won the browser wars.
[+] [-] apo|6 years ago|reply
Perfectly in character for Gates to see the mistake as failure to enter the market with the copycat product rather than the product that creates an entirely new category.
I suppose the world needs people like this, but by golly there's no reason for them to get any more than acknowledgement for being one of many players.
If Microsoft had a history of doing things right consistently in the copycat position, that might be different. But as a generally mediocre player wielding a monopoly position to follow the technological lead of others Microsoft is really quite uninspiring.
[+] [-] thelazydogsback|6 years ago|reply
As noted, MS was early to research and market in several areas including tablets and mobile, but either lacked a creativity escape velocity or quit just before hardware was up to the task, then failing at a restart. As someone who has spent their early career creating voice recognition products, it's also frustrating that they were so far ahead with speech reco (hiring the CMU peeps, many versions of SAPI, etc.) and then totally failing to do anything interesting with it at the OS and app level. If not mobile, MS should have been first for in-home voice assistant devices. (My and others' protestations for multi-modal or voice-only devices landed on deaf ears.)
As for Windows Phone, not allowing Silverlight apps to load/run on it from the web was a horrible decision, as this would have allowed u/x experiences that were years away from happening in the mobile browser.
Personally, I miss the T-Mobile Sidekick and the Blackberry Curve devices -- really all you need is Select, ExecuteThis and ContextMenuThis to do everything -- I was disappointed when Android gave up on the context menu. However, Android is still leagues better than iOS where every app is an adventure game.
[disclaimer: my first stint at MS was during the aforementioned time from '90-95.)
[+] [-] gesman|6 years ago|reply
Say it, Bill
[+] [-] im_down_w_otp|6 years ago|reply
I've now been an Android user (Nexus 5, Moto X Pure, Nokia 6.1 Plus) for a few years. I've never been quite satisfied with the platform and the various quirks of the phones I've owned. Everytime the iPhone SE's make their way back to Apple's refurb site I almost purchase one for myself and my wife. I wish Windows Mobile had managed to generate enough interest and gravity to sustain as a viable alternative.
[+] [-] RickJWagner|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshanderson|6 years ago|reply
You could have given Microsoft everything they needed to dominate in mobile and they still would have screwed it up because of the Microsoft mentality back then. Even after iPhone came out, Ballmer famously said iPhones were stupid.
[+] [-] netwanderer3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryenus|6 years ago|reply
And those in Google are probably also kicking themselves for taking their eyes off the ball and allowing Oracle to acquire Sun