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Bill Gates Says Windows Phone Strategy Was Inadequate

Posted by Unknown on from the not-the-worst-thing dept.

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."'"

15 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Like... by pubwvj · · Score: 5, Funny

    Duh.

    1. Re:Like... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Everybody thinks Ballmer has dropped the ball. According to Joachim Kempin, it's more likely that he's dropped the bat.

      Steve Ballmer Roams The Halls Of Microsoft Swinging A Baseball Bat

      Microsoft's history is filled with stories about its rough culture, from it's "stack-ranking" employee reviews to how Bill Gates used to yell, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." Here's another one: Six-foot-two Steve Ballmer sometimes brings a baseball bat with him into meetings, and that's if he's feeling happy...

      http://www.businessinsider.com/ballmer-roams-halls-with-baseball-bat-2013-2

    2. Re:Like... by mrbluejello · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This article title is WRONG. Windows Mobile had the problem, which is the predecessor to Windows Phone.

      Big difference, completely different platform.

    3. Re:Like... by dhavleak · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Exactly correct -- but you're expecting too much of Slashdot, and too much of The Register.

      The exact quote from the interview is "Gates admitted the company didn't "get out in the lead very early" on cell phones. He said, "We didn't miss cell phones, but the way that we went about it didn't allow us to get the leadership. So it's clearly a mistake."

      i.e. He's saying they were there with Windows Mobile when the market was in it's infancy but Windows Mobile was clearly a mistake.

      But like I said -- you're on Slashdot. Don't expect logic to get in the way of an old-fashioned MS-bashfest.

  2. big by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Considering the lead Microsoft had in the mobile phone market, they were there in 2002 (before Blackberry, I believe), but somehow they never made it work. I'm not sure exactly why. It's actually surprising, not that they failed, but how big their failure actually is.

    They knew it was important, they tried to get the market, had a huge lead, and they failed. It's a little more than 'inadequate.'

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re:big by Pausanias · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's Windows. Everything had to be windows. They stuck to windows until the gamechangers (iPhone, Android) had market dominance... now is a little too late to switch everything over to Metro.

      The problem is, you can't just always be reactive. You have to lead at some point, with real innovation. And this company has simply never done that.

    2. Re:big by jd2112 · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.)

      --
      Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
  3. Re:Uh huh... by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They've had sixteen or seventeen years to get the various iterations of MSN right, and after billions of dollars have still failed to show much for it. Sure, they've turned Yahoo from competitor into customer, but Google is so far ahead one has to question Microsoft's long term strategic capacity. Even the XBox division, while perhaps having some quarters in the black, is still a big hole that Microsoft shoveled money into to buy market share, and is many years away from ever paying back its investment.

    Microsoft has three major profit areas; enterprise volume licensing, OEM consumer licensing and Exchange-Office. It has made a shitload of money off of them, and while it's likely to lose the consumer crown pretty soon as the home PC begins to fade as a must-have computer product, it will still have the enterprise world locked up for some time to come.

    Frankly I think they should admit defeat on their mobile and tablet offerings, buy Blackberry, which at least still has some corporate penetration, and tighten the links between those mobile products and Office-Exchange. RT and Surface are still demonstrating just how much Microsoft is on the wrong side of the door trying to get in.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  4. Mistake?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It may be a mistake but weighed against the disaster of Balmer's leadership of Microsoft... You'd be forced to conclude the mobile market was a success.

  5. He also admitted he is not happy with Balmer by Billly+Gates · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I happen to agree with that.

    Will Bill Gates return then? I like the newer gentler Microsoft even if it is turning incompetent. If Bill was left IE would still have IE 6 crap in their on purpose to make it incompatible with everything else and .docx would be a drmed binary format with no OpenXML so no LibreOffice or GoogleDocs compatibility.

    He did the same tricks with SCO Unix before they sold it completely to make sure apps could not be ported. Balmer is too stupid to be this evil

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
    1. Re:He also admitted he is not happy with Balmer by JDG1980 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Will Bill Gates return then? I like the newer gentler Microsoft even if it is turning incompetent. If Bill was left IE would still have IE 6 crap in their on purpose to make it incompatible with everything else and .docx would be a drmed binary format with no OpenXML so no LibreOffice or GoogleDocs compatibility.

      The reason Microsoft isn't doing this crap any more (at least not nearly as much) isn't because Ballmer is less ruthless than Gates was. It's because the European Union found the balls to do what the US antitrust authorities wouldn't, and actually effectively regulated Microsoft's worst anticompetitive excesses. Not only that, but an array of governments and large corporations got bit hard by Microsoft's lock-in as a result of the IE6 fiasco, so they made it clear that they weren't going to put up with any more proprietary nonsense like ActiveX. The whole reason why OOXML was created is that many government agencies insisted on an open and documented file format, and were about to switch to ODF if Microsoft had held the line on their opaque binary blobs.

  6. Great job Microsoft! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You heavily promote a WP 7.5 product - the Lumia 900 - and not two months later you declare it to be incapable of running WP8. Good job of throwing WP7.5 users to the wolves. And they wonder why they're losing money...

  7. Re:Uh huh... by Teresita · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Frankly I think they should admit defeat on their mobile and tablet offerings, buy Blackberry, which at least still has some corporate penetration, and tighten the links between those mobile products and Office-Exchange. RT and Surface are still demonstrating just how much Microsoft is on the wrong side of the door trying to get in.

    Microsoft is always a day late and a dollar short. They're just getting Bing together when Search is yesterday. By the time they put out a decent smartphone, in 2017, everyone will say that's so five years ago because the Samsung Shirtbutton will be uploading everything a user sees and does, real time to Facebook and Google Goggles will be all the rage for web content delivery.

  8. You missed 0.2425 days by jabberw0k · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  9. Re:Uh huh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I suspect their R&D department has all kinds of enthusiasm... right before the bean counters have their good shit shelved. It's a miracle the Kinect made it out the doors, and even then, they let a surprise HW hit collect dust.

    Remember the Courier? That thing would've been great, and they had a prototype ready before the iPad's dropped. Can you remember people actively petitioning for a microsoft product with "goddamnyou, here, take my money!"? Yeah, they let that die.

    Multitouch? They had that in the original surface, the table not that tablet, before the iPhone existed. Died.

    That place needs to start loping off heads, starting at the top.