Bill Gates Thinks Windows Mobile Would Have Beaten Android Without Microsoft's Antitrust Woes (theverge.com) 254
Bill Gates has revealed that he thinks everyone would be using Windows Mobile right now if Microsoft hadn't have been caught up in a US Justice Department antitrust investigation. From a report: Speaking at The New York Times' DealBook Conference earlier this week, Gates revealed his thoughts on Microsoft's mobile mistakes. "There's no doubt that the antitrust lawsuit was bad for Microsoft, and we would have been more focused on creating the phone operating system and so instead of using Android today you would be using Windows Mobile," claimed Gates. "If it hadn't been for the antitrust case... we were so close, I was just too distracted. I screwed that up because of the distraction."
Microsoft's messy move from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone allowed Android to thrive, but at the time the company had the biggest opportunity in mobile and gave it away. Gates also revealed that Microsoft also missed the opportunity to launch Windows Mobile on a key Motorola handset. "We were just three months too late on a release Motorola would have used on a phone, so yes it's a winner takes all game," explained Gates. "Now nobody here has ever heard of Windows Mobile, but oh well. That's a few hundred billion here or there."
Microsoft's messy move from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone allowed Android to thrive, but at the time the company had the biggest opportunity in mobile and gave it away. Gates also revealed that Microsoft also missed the opportunity to launch Windows Mobile on a key Motorola handset. "We were just three months too late on a release Motorola would have used on a phone, so yes it's a winner takes all game," explained Gates. "Now nobody here has ever heard of Windows Mobile, but oh well. That's a few hundred billion here or there."
The antitrust investigation hurt you? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you shouldn't have built a company that ended up in a position to be investigated for antitrust violations. You have only yourself to blame there Billy...
Now let's do the same thing with Google. It's high time... Microsoft was a featherweight in that respect compared to Google.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:The antitrust investigation hurt you? (Score:4, Insightful)
Google's search dominance doesn't matter?
They used it to promote their own browser and that browser became the most popular which has many privacy concerns from a conflict of interest to their advertising business.
That alone is probably the most worrying thing Google has ever done and you say there's no evidence?
The very same advertising system that gave them the revenue to make Android and search dominance that helped them push people to Android just like Chrome.
Anytime a dominant player in an industry uses their influence to press into another industry and dominate it as well, there needs to be an anti-trust investigation.
And Google most certainly fits that criteria.
Re:The antitrust investigation hurt you? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google's search dominance doesn't matter?
They used it to promote their own browser and that browser became the most popular which has many privacy concerns from a conflict of interest to their advertising business.
That's not why Chrome became so popular. Chrome became popular because it was more responsive and more flexible than Firefox, which at that time had become bloated and slow. These days FFox is a lot faster but people aren't going to switch back just because "it's as good as chrome".
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Re:The antitrust investigation hurt you? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, they pushed hard, but it was easy to because IE sucked so badly. Developers poured lots of money into IE-based apps, which provided Microsoft with a lock on apps and platform.
Chrome simply worked and rendered well. When Apache dominance started to appear, Chrome worked really well with it, far more simply, and with fewer glaring holes. As Microsoft had their lightbulb moment, and pushed into dividing user space from kernel space, things kind of worked, but it was too late.
Gates flatters himself. His Business-As-War model was wrong from the beginning.
Re:The antitrust investigation hurt you? (Score:4, Informative)
Chrome simply worked and rendered well. When Apache dominance started to appear, Chrome worked really well with it, far more simply, and with fewer glaring holes.
Apache was dominant way before Chrome even existed, and you could serve standards-compliant web pages even with IIS. There was no conflict between IE and Apache, nor with Chrome and IIS. But IE never supported standards properly, even getting the CSS box model wrong, so it was necessary to have separate style sheets for IE and for everyone else.
Re:The antitrust investigation hurt you? (Score:5, Insightful)
M$ was not trying to corner the market on web browsers, they were using that to sell IIS and other systems, to include OS.
When caught doing these things and determined to be doing this anti-competitive behavior which was determined to be illegal, M$'s answer was to obfuscate the situation, lie, and do everything they could to ignore the court orders.
IE was not then, and never has been the 'best' web browser, it was simply reinstalled and not allowed (at that time) to be removed by the user (according to M$).
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Re:The antitrust investigation hurt you? (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft was slow getting on board with this whole Internet thing. Gates had thought the AOL/CompuServe/GEnie model of subscription dialup forums and bulletin boards would dominate. He had partnered with NBC for content, to form their entry into the dialup service market - MSNBC (which they later shortened to MSN; yes you originally had to pay to access that too).
When the Internet and worldwide web blew those away, he was kinda lost. He no longer had any OS advantage since websites used a browser that could run on any OS. The vulnerability he found in that model was the browser. Microsoft made Internet Explorer for Windows and included it for free. That pulled the rug out from under Netscape's software as a product business model, and they were forced to make it free to "compete". But how can you compete against an OS maker including their own browser in the OS? That's what the antitrust lawsuit was about.
The whole thing was just an attempt to grab control too. The target was never Netscape. It was the HTML standard. Microsoft added ActiveX to IE to give scripting functionality to websites - something HTML couldn't do at the time. They wanted to turn the web away from using the open HTML standard, to using Microsoft's proprietary ActiveX standard. That way they could leverage their OS dominance to gain control of the new "platform" - the Web. When it failed, they just abandoned it. Which left South Korea in a lurch since the government had believed Microsoft's PR, and had mandated by law that all government and banking websites had be based on ActiveX. With Microsoft no longer maintaining it and providing security updates for it, their entire financial and government system became vulnerable to hacking.
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Re:The antitrust investigation hurt you? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm guessing you weren't around back then. Browsers were originally a software product - like Photoshop or Office. You had to buy a copy of Netscape to be able to browse the web.
No. You did not. You could download Mosaic for free. Or if you had Motif libraries, a license for which was around $100 (or you got it free with the purchase of Caldera Network Desktop) you could even download the sources and build them yourself. By the time Mosaic was unsuitable for common browsing tasks, you could download Netscape Navigator for free, too.
Microsoft made Internet Explorer for Windows and included it for free.
Yes, but by the time, Netscape was also free. What it wasn't was bundled. Microsoft bundled IE, and also forbade OEMs from bundling Netscape. The latter is actually what got them into trouble, not the former.
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And Internet Explorer worked better than Netscape.
lol no.
It started faster, because it was preloaded, and it ran ActiveX bullshit, because that was designed to only work in Aieee! But that's a far cry from "worked better".
Re: The antitrust investigation hurt you? (Score:4, Insightful)
Internet explorer and chrome dominance aren't even comparable, and it's absurd to do so. Microsoft's whole purpose behind building internet explorer to begin with (and was revealed when their internal emails were subpoenaed) was because they saw the web as a threat to windows, which at the time was their baby that they were doing anything to protect. In the emails, they specifically noted how Netscape was ported to many OSes and allowed plugins that worked across those OSes. Microsoft didn't like that there was truly portable code that could make what OS it runs on irrelevant. They also didn't like the thought of the web itself becoming a computing platform.
They saw the same threat in Java, hence they created their own Java VM that had proprietary extensions that only worked on Windows. This was mentioned as the specific intent in the infamous "embrace extend extinguish" email.
Microsoft made many similar efforts towards making the web proprietary in the form of ActiveX, which was a plug-in that only worked with internet explorer and allowed websites to literally execute compiled binary code on your PC (Did I mention this opened up huge security vulnerabilities? I probably don't need to.)
Once IE6 became dominant with all of this proprietary crap, guess what happened next? Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all, for years, and the web stagnated hard. Google's software platform is and always was the web (yes, there's Android, but Google basically reserves that for whatever you can't do in a practical manner on the web, like taking photos, using sensors, and shit like that.) Having said that, Google didn't like having to wait on other vendors to improve their shit before they could improve their own applications. Google began with making improvements to webkit, but Safari still sucked.
Enter chrome. It would totally make sense for Google to promote the crap out of chrome. The problem the web had at the time (and still has, to a degree) was that if the dominant browser didn't support a standard, then in all practically you couldn't use it on your website. So, Google needed to make webkit's features more common. You had Safari already, now another browser comes in to promote its use further. Now Google can finally build the platform it wants, rather than what Microsoft wanted.
While Firefox was good, and even began to dominate the browser market share, its engine wasn't flexible enough for what Google wanted. KHTML, which webkit was based on, was built around the idea of being usable by more than one browser. Another thing Google needed to do that Gecko couldn't help with at the time was offer a reason to download chrome. Google's "differentiator" here was the speed of the browser, and gecko just couldn't offer that. (Recall those ads a while back showing how fast chrome could render a page.)
Chrome hasn't caused the web to stagnate, quite the opposite actually. While there may be other things that Google does to harm consumers, Chrome just isn't it. Chrome, more or less, broke the internet explorer monopoly. Google's search doesn't appear to be harming consumers either. The fact that it works so damn well is why it is so dominant. In Europe, Google's search has an actual monopoly, but it isn't because Google is harming competitors, rather it's because Google is very good about indexing the web in basically every language, whereas the others are only decent in English. Google didn't cause nobody to use them, in fact Microsoft still makes it needlessly hard to change your default search to anything other than Bing, and even tells you no less than four times that you really should try crappy edge before it finally lets you change your default browser. Chrome doesn't get downloaded as much as it does because Google is using leverage, it's because edge is dogshit.
Disclaimer: I almost exclusively use Firefox, including on Android (using Firefox Focus to post this, and random surfing, and Firefox Preview for general purposes.) Nonetheless, I'm not going to try to pretend that chrome isn't the dominant browser.
Browsers are irrelevant (Score:3)
They cost nothing, are interchangable in the way OS's are not and don't require specialised support so no 3rd party income from them (other than silly plugins which are usually free anyway) therefore they mean nothing. And as companies have found out - trying to leverage their browser with incompatible extensions always ends in tears.
Android is a different matter , it leads to billions in income for google and with that money they can keep up with Apple.
Advertising can be done on any browser.
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You don't have to use Google Chrome in order to use Google Search...
If Google Chrome has privacy concerns, DON'T FUK'N USE IT!
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Google tries to lock people into using their products and then collects data on those people and their usage and habits and conversations and sells it to advertisers and third parties.
No, they don't sell it to third parties, although they do provide tools which enable those third parties to capture their own data. Like the credit card companies, they will permit you to advertise to target groups identified by their data, and then you can glean information about those people from the responses.
Google is orders of magnitude more evil than Microsoft.
Microsoft baked functionality into their OS that can report on every byte and every keystroke, and then put into the EULA language giving them the right to do so any time they wanted. Tell us again
Re:The antitrust investigation hurt you? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Google made at least 2 attempts to knock down a monopolist and got kicked on their asses both times. The other attempt was Google Fiber, and while it is the best product out there you probably can't get, might have resulted in the whole Alphabet nonsense. It turns out that AT&T shareholders are rich, strong and don't really believe in capitalism. Since that happened Google has become a much more menacing presence, I think wrestling with that particular demon left them a little haunted.
Billy just got greedy and got spanked. He can cry into his fat stacks of billions and never see the tiny violin playing for him. He deserved what happened to him, the message was clear: don't be a dick.
Re:The antitrust investigation hurt you? (Score:4, Informative)
People keep trying to paint the ISP market in the U.S. as an example of failed capitalism. It has nothing to do with capitalism. Companies like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast/Xfinity, and Time Warner/Spectrum are given service monopolies by the local government. Winning in the ISP market means becoming the best at greasing the palms of the local politicians. In the previous city I lived in, Verizon stopped rolling out FIOS for 3 years (two blocks away from my home) because they refused to pay the increased rate the city demanded (something like $30/mo per subscribing home). Eventually they negotiated it down to $10/mo as a cost which could be passed on to the subscriber (one of those mysterious surcharges in your bill), and Verizon resumed FIOS expansion.
The ISP market in the U.S. is a poster child for failed government regulation. Corruption by politicians has resulted in a system where the government sells access to customers as if they were cattle. If a business refuses to participate, the regulators simply do not give them permission to provide service.
Re:The antitrust investigation hurt you? (Score:5, Insightful)
My thoughts exactly. Sounded to me like:
"If only we weren't already under investigation for our hideously transparent monopoly abuses, we could have abused our monopoly to dominate another market."
Cry me a river.
Re:The antitrust investigation hurt you? (Score:4, Funny)
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Yep, that's exactly as I read it, too.
The antitrust case worked, then. You didn't get to force your way into anything.
Dead Wrong! (Score:3)
No, the problem is that Google and Apple beat your asses to selling the Telemetry to everyone that wanted to buy it and having strong fanboi fan bases.
Being better, Having more, having skills or technology had not a single fucking thing to do with it. Never has been, there have been all sorts of examples of superior technology being beaten because no matter how good it is... it also depends on how much that product also help makes 3rd party sectors money too.
This is what made the Windows OS popular instead of linux or mac. Microsoft has long forgotten what gave it its original large market share and in this day and age... if Microsoft was starting now in the OS market it would never have made it because the mentality of the Company is entirely something else now.
That's a few hundred billion here or there (Score:2)
Ugh, a few more such failures and soon you'll be talking real money!
I bought a phone on clearance (Score:5, Interesting)
And to tell you the truth it wasn't bad. The interface was responsive and never lagged and this was the low end model. The tiles make way more sense on smaller screens. But it was too little too late and combined with no big name apps it was DOA.
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And to tell you the truth it wasn't bad. The interface was responsive and never lagged and this was the low end model. The tiles make way more sense on smaller screens. But it was too little too late and combined with no big name apps it was DOA.
You're talking about Windows Phone, not Windows Mobile though. From the context of his discussion, it sounds like he actually thinks the terrible Windows Mobile from back in the day (early 2000s) could somehow have been good enough that we'd have all wanted to use it.
The reality is, it was a garbage OS. It was basically Windows 98 on a small screen, and there were a lot of really awful things about trying to actually use it. It was never much more than a novelty.
Bill should probably just admit that they
Re:I bought a phone on clearance (Score:5, Funny)
The reality is, it was a garbage OS. It was basically Windows 98 on a small screen, and there were a lot of really awful things about trying to actually use it. It was never much more than a novelty.
If it were windows 98 on a small screen there would have been software for it. But it was wince. Seldom has an OS had a more appropriate name.
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That is NOT the reality at all. WinCE was actually a very compact very high quality Operating System with a nice API that closely followed existing Win32APIs. There was literally nothing bad about except the shell!
I had an IPAQ H2215 and it sucked in every way. Fuck wince.
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There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the OS other than the shell. It was very stable (although a lot 3rd party software wasn't), and run well on systems that were heavily constrained for memory memory and CPU power.
No, it didn't. I was always running out of memory, and my IPAQ had literally the most powerful ARM processor of its day (PXA255) and was still slow. I also used to have a Dt360 tablet, and that was a turd, too, until I put Linux on it. Wince was a turd, and turned everything it touched to shit. It made no sense whatsoever to keep that product going as long as they did. Absolutely none.
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And the crashes... so many weird hangs and crashes.
Re:I bought a phone on clearance (Score:4, Interesting)
Bill cannot admit what he doesn't believe. He actually thinks MS produces good interfaces because he won't use anything else to which to compare them.
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I think you're talking about Windows Phone, which I agree was not all that bad. I too got a cheap refurbished one, and it worked surprisingly well in many ways. It was better than Android in a select few functions. Still, I don't think it ever could have been a serious competitor to Android.
But from the summary, it looks like Gates was talking about the earlier Windows Mobile platform, which was different from Windows Phone. I had it on an old Dell Axim PDA. It was quite good, built on Windows CE. I think i
They kept changing things for developers (Score:2, Insightful)
They kept changing the way developers would have to make apps for their platform. They kept changing the phone UI. They kept rebranding and relaunching, having no clear way to transition between their old attempt and their new attempt. Between relaunches there was a dearth of hardware, and when they did launch there was a lack of choice of both handsets and carriers. Often the Windows apps would have less functionality than the iOS or Android apps, and come very late to the platform, or just be a dressed up
Re:They kept changing things for developers (Score:5, Insightful)
But since Microsoft killed off the handheld market by producing Windows CE and dictating to hardware vendors how it must be displayed and run while paying them to do this they effectively killed off the thing which would have helped them grow the Windows phone market. ie a software tie between the device and desktop OS.
They even tried paying companies to use the devices like they did with the MS Surface and the NFL. But the iPhone showed, like Palm did before it, that making the UI simple and easy to use people will gobble it up. Android made something close but much less expensive and quickly gained all the non-Apple phone vendors support. Microsoft might have finally came up with a usable OS in Windows Phone( as opposed to Windows CE ) but they were WAY late and had no way to leverage the Windows desktop OS position to push Windows Phone on Windows users.
What they did to Nokia just shows to what extent they will go to get into the markets when they have no way to use Windows OEMs to push Microsoft product.
They really do not know how to compete and they tried many things and all failed.
LoB
Folks at Google weren't helping either! (Score:2)
... "If it hadn't been for the antitrust case... we were so close, I was just too distracted. I screwed that up because of the distraction."...
To explain my title, Google wasn't anywhere close to helping Windows with a functional GMail or YouTube client. Without those two, many would not delve into the Windows ecosystem; myself included.
Further: How do you compete with free? Folks were also tired of Windows everywhere...in the living room, at the office & internet through Internet Explorer, at the ATMs etc etc...
The "tech" media fan boys were cheering the "new kid on the block" too - Google. How about the incompetency of Stephen Elop? It wa
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As the hip kids say (Score:2)
OK billionaire.
No phone maker would pick MS (Score:5, Interesting)
They knew what they had was extremely bad. Symbian OS? What a joke it was. But still they all knew one thing. They did not want MS to be their OS.
What killed MS dominance was its misuse of its dominance. It successfully killed Netscape that threatened to make OS irrelevant by making the browser the common virtual machine all applications can work on. But eventually Chrome and then iPad made browser the common virtual machine.
Once the market split into content creation machines, and content consumption machines, the PC era was over. MSFT also waged a costly war to get the gaming market. By the time it eventually won it, by outlasting its competitors by absorbing losses, the game market itself changed. Into networked, imaginative hand held phone games outsold the monotonous first person shooters based on XBox.
Re:No phone maker would pick MS (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you are attacking all the wrong things.
It successfully killed Netscape that threatened to make OS irrelevant by making the browser the common virtual machine all applications can work on.
The browser as a common virtual machine was not a threat until 10 years after Microsoft killed Netscape. The biggest threat Netscape provided was that Microsoft could not define what HTML was and could not create traction with ActiveX, which meant that the web was not synonymous with Windows.
Once the market split into content creation machines, and content consumption machines, the PC era was over.
What devices are used to create content? Other than 30-second video clips of teenagers dumping ice on themselves, most substantive content is created on PCs. Now, if Photoshop for iPad becomes a thing then maybe we will see serious content creation move to mobile devices. But that hasn't happened yet.
Into networked, imaginative hand held phone games outsold the monotonous first person shooters based on XBox.
This is the first time I've heard that XBox was inferior in this way. Microsoft's most recent major mistake with Xbox was betting on Kinect and Hololens in an attempt to be the next Wii, and thus overpricing their hardware.
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99% of the PC buyers did nothing but browse the web, read email, and look at photos. But they kept buying full fledged PCs that can do full fledged app development, video editing etc. That kept lowering the cost of PCs. Now the market is bifurcated. My full fledged development machines, (128 GB to 512 GB RAM, 32 processors, 4 TB hard disk, 1 TB SSD) are not dropping in price they used to anymore. PCs still dominate this sector. But most email reading net browsing peo
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99% of the PC buyers did nothing but browse the web, read email, and look at photos.
You're forgetting games. Even from literally the first PC, games were commonly played on PCs (albeit quite primitive ones back in the 5150 days — I used to play Kingdom of Kraz and Zork on mine.) Before WYSIWYG, games were the primary applications driving new PC sales. Then for a short while many users commonly had non-game applications which actually consumed meaningful resources, until PCs got another leap in performance and most WYSIWYG apps no longer substantially taxed them — and games went
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Video game is still a niche market. Simple browsing tablets and chromebook clones have much larger revenue streams. You can look at every iPad, chromebook, as a machine that took away a sale of a PC. These users were su
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The number of people who don't play video games is an order of magnitude bigger.
What? Who told you that? Over 50% of Americans play video games. An order of magnitude more than 50% would be 500%. How do you think that works?
Granted, many of those people are playing solitaire or what have you, which is not very demanding. But your statement was nonsensical regardless.
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Ah, so you're the guy who didn't think superbugs were a "threat" until the first reported case of vancomycin intermediate Staphylococcus aureus (VISA) was reported in Japan in 1996.
Shit, our last resort is on its last gasp. We should do something, STAT!
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Please excuse my pre-coffee stutter in my previous post.
Good one! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Murderer thinks he would've committed another murder without his prison woes" - thanks for confirming the usefulness of criminal law!
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft failed repeatedly to create a touchscreen friendly UI for decades because they kept trying to shoehorn in the use of existing Windows applications. Microsoft could have been a leader if they hadn't been so shortsighted. This is a painful truth that nobody at Microsoft wanted to acknowledge until competitors had already dominated the playing field.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Funny)
A lot of projects starting from scratch will fail (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
WinCE [wikipedia.org] came out in 1996.
Android [wikipedia.org] first came out in 2007. (Technically, the first commercial version wasn't until 2008 but let's give them the benefit of the doubt.)
In ELEVEN fucking years Microsoft couldn't make a phone that people actually wanted!!! And Bill Gates has the audacity to say it was because of legal issues??? HA HA HA [youtu.be]
It took Apple adding physics to UI before people wanted phones.
MS has NEVER understood good UI. Hell, they had to basically copy Apple for Windows 3.x and Windows 95 -- and they managed to even fuck THAT up. Win 8 and Win 10 is proof they STILL don't have a fucking clue.
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Windows 95 looks way more like NeXTSTEP than MacOS.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
Windows 95 looks way more like NeXTSTEP than MacOS.
It looks more like OS/2 than either, which is presumably not an accident.
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I agree, and it's somewhat hilarious that MacOS is essentially just NeXTSTEP now.
NeXTStep only slower. How they managed to make OSX less responsive on multi-processor/multicore systems than NeXTStep was on a turbo slab is beyond me, but Apple managed it somehow.
To be fair, the only OSX machine I still own is a dome iMac (the very last one, with the decent GPU) and the most powerful machine I've used with it was a dual G5, but srsly.
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OMG This sums it up. I have no mod points right now. But people called WinCE "wince" for a reason.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
So it was completely Microsoft's own fault - they missed the boat on the convergence between PDAs and phones. My theory is that all of Microsoft's upper management had assistants chasing them around handling their calls (phone) and scheduling (PDA), so they never foresaw the convergence between PDAs and phones. Meanwhile, to any regular person with both a phone and PDA bumping into each other in their pocket with each step, this convergence was obvious and couldn't come soon enough.
The beneficiary wasn't Apple. It was Blackberry (Research in Motion). They were the first to marry a rudimentary PDA with a phone. Then Nokia combined the phone with a general purpose CPU and OS which could run generic apps. Those two dominated the early smartphone OS market [sourcedigit.com]. The iPhone took 3 years to pass RIM, and 4 years to pass Nokia's Symbian. Android passed iOS is just 2.5 years, and it's pretty clear from the chart that the fall of RIM and Symbian mirrors Android's rise, not iOS'.
The main feature Apple brought to phones was an easy-to-use market for installing generic apps onto the phone directly. Before then, you were stuck with the pre-loaded apps (RIM and early flip phones which could run apps), or had to hook the phone up to a PC to sideload new apps (Palm, WinCE, Symbian). The iPhone wasn't even the first touchscreen-only phone - the LG Prada was [wikipedia.org].
Windows' UI is actually based on IBM's Common User Access [wikipedia.org] guidelines. IBM basically spent millions of dollars researching how people interacted with a GUI, and came up with a list of common elements that all GUI programs should conform to (no more having to memorize WordPerfect function keys). Many people forget, but IBM hired Microsoft to build a GUI for the PC in the form of OS/2. Microsoft then stole most of the concepts from OS/2 (including CUA), put them in Windows, and gave IBM the middle finger.
That's the kind of stuff Gates did - steal control of other people's good ideas away from them. When an obvious transition like the convergence between phones and PDAs was staring him in the face, he couldn't see it because he really wasn't a prognosticator. If nobody had done it yet, he couldn't steal it.
Different motivations (Score:3)
The three players have different approaches to making money. We all know this very well.
Apple wants to sell hardware and services, and to some degree some lifestyle patina.
Google wants to sell you to advertiser so it can give it away, everything else is secondary at best..
Microsoft wants to sell software and leverage the captive Windows/Office market.
One made the most money. One captured the most devices.
Microsoft lost over, and over, and over again due to their Windows fixation and it's
culture of wanting to dominate and then destroy all competitors. Didn't work this time.
Too early (Score:3)
You fambois are funny (Score:3)
You don't know the history of cell phones and "smart" phones but make pronouncements about them
You talk shit about Microsoft while ignoring how Google tries for customer lock-in and then spies on it's customers to make vast amounts selling that data to other companies, advertisers, and people looking to manipulate voters.
I used Windows 8 (Score:2)
And remember, all the while Microsoft was counting on the fact that the Windows Mobile and Windows 8 experience were virtually identical and that I would want
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No it wasn't.
I had a Windows phone something like... 10 years ago now is it? It had one of those touch pen thingies that slid into the side of it. Matter of fact, I still have that phone in my drawer at home. It's served its time.
There was nothing inherently wrong with this phone. I remember missing my Razor (the Motorola one) for some time, damn I loved that thing. But this Windows phone never made me swear and regret that I got it.
Actually, the only phone I've felt that way about was that useless Chinese
Windows imMobile (Score:2)
I bought a Dell PDA running mobile. Nice hardware, fast and at a good price.
Interface wasn't bad, customized it to my preferences. Loaded my datelife on it.
When the battery died, it went back to factory settings with everything lost.
It begged for its Windows tether. It never restored everything anywhere near completely.
Wasted hours and hours wrangling with the backup app. Then it happened the second time.
It went in the drawer to die.
Everything Microsoft ends in tears.
No shit Sherlock (Score:2)
Real brain on that guy.
Lack of spiffs killed Windows Mobile (Score:2)
I'm guessing Bill's a bit right here, and yeah, this is functioning as designed. The whole point was to prevent the bigger market player from leveraging their dominance to squeez
senile ? (Score:3)
He's getting senile and old. Or he's on the wrong kind of drugs. Or he's just being his usual self, sprouting nonsense and FUD.
Windows Mobile? The windows mobile? An abomination that even rabbid MS fanboys disliked? That was on par with Windows Me ? That got just about everything wrong you can get wrong about a mobile OS?
Yeah, sure thing. Would've beaten someone. A dead squirrel, maybe.
Re:senile ? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the end, Microsoft's over-reliance on Office to push Windows Mobile probably had the opposite effect in that the exclusivity pushed even more people toward Google's offerings, since they came bundled and worked well on the most popular phone OS. Google concentrated on shoring up compatibility with Office file formats and as a result, Google now has a strong presence in a market that, for the longest time, Microsoft completely dominated (there may have been alternatives but they never got any significant usage, especially in business or education).
Microsoft's failing was that they didn't understand how smartphones were being used and the importance of the app library until well past the time where they could have actually done anything to capture the market. I do think it's possible that had Bill still been involved in MS to the degree he was in the 90s, he could have anticipated how the smartphone market would develop like he was able to anticipate a great many developments in his Internet Tidal Wave memo [justice.gov]. However, by the time his insight could have been useful, he was already more focused on his philanthropy efforts and retirement while Steve squandered the company's resources and fostered an environment of incompetence and boot-licking internally.
It could have gone a lot worse, to be honest. If Bill had actually stuck around and actually accomplished what he wishes he did, we'd be dealing with 90s-era Microsoft and Apple as the two major players most likely. As much as I dislike Google, things could have turned much worse than the dominant phone OS being a proprietary layer (Android) on top of a relatively open base (AOSP) that largely free and open custom ROMs can be built on as an alternative (e.g. LineageOS).
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Good! (Score:2)
Too bad, Bill. Antitrust laws did their job. Android is at least a semi-open platform, and MS controlling both desktop and mobile would be a bad thing. Without the success of Android, Google Office probably wouldn't be giving MS word-processor and spreadsheet competition, which is sorely needed. And MS's mobile products were a bloated mess.
WM aka WinCE was never going to beat IOS (Score:2)
Windows Mobile, built atop WinCE did its market damage by
killing PalmOS. It then ruled the smartphone market for
several years but stagnated with the forced Win desktop
on tiny RESISTIVE phone screens UI. Apple showed up
and the whole smartphone market changed nearly overnight.
MS was never going to dominate over IOS or Android (a "free" copy of IOS).
Please schedule an exam for Bill (Score:2)
...he's exhibiting signs of dementia. Or he's delusional.
Sure... (Score:2)
And I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you pesky kids!
OK boomer (Score:2)
Selectively remembering how great things were.
Gates thinks everyone would use Windows Mobile (Score:2)
No it wouldn't due to MS culture at the time (Score:2)
Even today (I often use windows) the whole relentless pushing edge and cortana in my face is nasty. I run special scripts that are needed to properly avoid onedrive, etc. I recently installed windows and had to do it with the internet disconn
Re:Plus (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus windows phone was shit. I can only imagine windows mobile was shittier than that.
I don't have to imagine, because I remember using it. It was crap and wouldn't have convinced anyone to rush out and buy it. He should just admit that they didn't have the right product at the right time. Even better, just admit that they'd never have been able to build the right product.
Re:Plus (Score:5, Funny)
That's not fair, the microsoft mouse was pretty good.
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I'm using it now (Score:3)
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Microsoft dropped support. (Score:3)
Re:Plus (Score:4, Interesting)
They were by today's standards bulky and expensive and I believe that is why they didn't catch on.
Microsoft senior management lost interest and by the time they realized they had missed a big opportunity, they were too far behind.
This is actually a cautionary tale for innovators. Sometimes you are way ahead of your time with a technology. If you are smart, you don't abandon it when it doesn't catch on, you keep it on a back burner so when market conditions improve you can ramp up quickly.
Re:Plus (Score:5, Informative)
This is actually a cautionary tale for innovators. Sometimes you are way ahead of your time with a technology. If you are smart, you don't abandon it when it doesn't catch on, you keep it on a back burner so when market conditions improve you can ramp up quickly.
Like kodak inventing digital cameras then sitting on them because they threatened their model and now look at them.
MS was too early, not too late (Score:2)
Re:Plus (Score:5, Informative)
I had a cheap Windows phone for a while, and I actually liked a lot about it. The tiles interface was nicer in some ways than the Android/iPhone interface. If there had been more apps available, and especially updates to things like Waze, I think it would have been a decent alternative.
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I had a cheap Windows phone that I bought because I wanted to check it out and it was hot garbage. How cheap? SUPER cheap! I think it was $49 from the local MS store. A whole phone! $49! No contact! How crazy is that?!? Can't lose, right?
Every corner of the UI was unpolished, like this screenshot [imgur.com] that shows white icons on a white background when putting the phone into light mode instead of dark mode. Or this one [imgur.com], where the designer didn't realize that you shouldn't have a hot white picture of the sun behind
Re:Plus (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. I've never seen an Android device with a little hole that you stick a paperclip in to reset it twice a day. Gates sounds like Uncle Rico on Napoleon Dynamite.
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Not sure what you're talking about. My Nokia is running the Win10 OS right now, and I ran Win8 on my previous Nokia; maybe some earlier version was bad?
And yes, when Win10 on a phone reaches EOL at the end of this year, I will be changing, probably to iOS (and a new phone). Reluctantly.
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Re:Actually you dropped the ball (Score:5, Insightful)
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My opinion is that MS was too busy fighting on multiple fronts that they created: Java, Netscape, etc. that it left mobile languishing for years. Bear mind, Windows CE was terrible. Like all things MS, it was buggy; it was Windows shoe-horned into mobile as opposed to an OS designed for mobile. Not that MS didn’t try: see Project Pink. Google and Apple were far more focused on getting their mobile projects to work.
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(Used to support a fleet of Win CE based GPS units, "wince" was the most appropriate name Microsoft ever gave a product.)
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Bill saw the internet coming. What he did not see it was as an application platform and he really did not WANT it to be an application platform because his bread was buttered selling traditional stand alone software to run his licensed operating environment.
Bill wanted to the internet to be something you sent aunt Tilly an update about what silly thing the cat did yesterday; got some sports scores and stock quotes from and maybe ordered some books. WebTv fit that model. When it became clear the WWW was not