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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."'"
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.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
It's a miracle the Kinect made it out the doors, and even then, they let a surprise HW hit collect dust.
The kinect (hardware, the device itself) did not really come from Microsoft's R&D.
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect
Kinect builds on software technology developed internally by Rare, a subsidiary of Microsoft Game Studios owned by Microsoft, and on range camera technology by Israeli developer PrimeSense, which developed a system that can interpret specific gestures, making completely hands-free control of electronic devices possible by using an infrared projector and camera and a special microchip to track the movement of objects and individuals in three dimension.