Bill Gates Says Windows Phone Strategy Was Inadequate

puddingebola writes "Perhaps it isn't newsworthy, but Bill Gates has characterized Microsoft's mobile and smartphone strategies as 'a mistake.' From the article: 'In an interview with CBS This Morning's Charlie Rose on Monday, Gates admitted he wasn't pleased with Microsoft's performance in the mobile market, going as far as to characterize the company's smartphone strategy as "a mistake." "We didn't miss cell phones," Gates said. "But the way that we went about it didn't allow us to get the leadership, so it's clearly a mistake."'"

Like...

[pubwvj]

Duh.

Re:big

[jd2112]

Anyone with a WinMo phone will tell you one of the biggest problems with them is the difficulty in finding apps that actually work.

I developed apps for Windows Mobile, and I can tell you that the biggest problem was getting a phone/OS that would actually work.

They were uniformly terrible, unreliable as phones and inconsistent and hard to understand as PDAs. You couldn't even rely on them as alarm clocks, given their propensity to hang and/or crash.

Not true. One of my co-workers has an old Windows phone. It works great and he had no problem getting apps for it.
(He rooted it and somehow hacked it to run Android.)

Re:big

[Anonymous Coward]

Spelling and grammer just happen to other folks, eh?

At Barnes and Noble

[paiute]

I just saw the 2013 printing of his book The Road Ahead with a sticker on the cover which read: Now Revised To Include Wireless.

You missed 0.2425 days

[jabberw0k]

I would prefer 24x7 to 24x7x365, as the latter misses leap years. It is my understanding, though, that Windows Phones now have achieved five-nines uptime, running properly 9.9999% of the time.