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.
> If anything, they overcorrected, dragged kicking and screaming into allowing apps at all.
A lot of people forget this, but it's true: Apple didn't want _anyone_ to be able to make native apps on iOS except themselves. That they changed their minds and helped devs make a ton of money tends to erase this fact of history.
I have this conspiracy theory that I half believe: it was all a ruse.
Apple knew that there would be huge pushback against a walled garden appstore with Apple in absolute control, and huge pushback on them taking a 30% cut. So they started with "just write web apps". But of course, they also inexplicably made the first iPhone 2G only! Flagship phones that shipped many months before the iPhone had 3G. Why cut that particular corner, and not any others in their otherwise $$$-is-no-object new wonderphone?
You can do a much better job hiding low bandwidth and high latency in a native app, especially since app assets get downloaded once (probably over wifi) at app install time. So by essentially making app developers beg for access to their native platform, they radically reduced the anger at their wildly locked-down appstore and their 30% cut.
And it seemed a little suspicious how quickly they were able to deliver a 3rd-party SDK and developer documentation.
they also inexplicably made the first iPhone 2G only!
This has been one of the go-to plays in Apple's playbook since the very beginning. Steve Jobs was always opposed to Macs having any form of user-upgradable parts [1]; he wanted people to buy a brand new computer every time theirs became obsolete. As it happens, this occurred almost immediately after the Mac 128k's launch (almost no 3rd party apps supported it). The first generation iPhone was an exact repeat!
Yes, like Microsoft, once they had established themselves as an engineering company with consumers of not-fully-developed product, they were then able to exploit the anti-reuse/recycling angle more lucratively than their engineering.
It was a very thin ruse, but there's no real conspiracy theory required. The original iPhone was a beta product rushed to market to make everyone else look "last gen". The final APIs, SDK, store infrastructure, and so on was simply not ready. And yes from day 1, rumors were a SDK was coming.
> And it seemed a little suspicious how quickly they were able to deliver a 3rd-party SDK and developer documentation.
How much of this is explained by needing an SDK and developer documentation for internal apps? (That is, had Apple not built an App Store, it would have been all the more important to make sure Mail, Maps, Safari, the built-in YouTube app, etc. were high-quality.)
In part I'm curious if the engineering culture was that reasonable-quality docs were expected for internal developers.
Never worked at Apple specifically, but every place I've worked had little to no docs on internal tools. The expectation was that you'd go ask the person who wrote it, or absorb the tribal knowledge as part of on-boarding. There was even low-level resistance to folks who tried to document the ambient knowledge to help out new employees.
Also, keep in mind, in the timeframe that is relevant here, the only apps were Mail and Safari. Apple making Mail a native app from the start was another tell that "you should just build web apps" was disingenuous.
No. Virtually all PalmOS software sales were either direct via dev’s web site, or via palmgear.com, which was a sort of app store for its time. They were not affiliated with Palm the company or its entities. Absolutely no platform DRM whatsoever, and all apps were basically “side loaded” onto devices, regardless of origin.
I think it was Handango that set the 30% expectation. They were the first with such a high cut I think, and was among the first app sites for most of the PDAs of the time.
30% was pretty offensive after years of shareware.
But then apps cost pennies compared to the software we were used to. Office cost many hundreds of dollars and I regularly paid £400+ for PC programs that did just one thing. £350 for Photoshop was a steal.
But then apps came along costing a small handful of dollars. They also did things you could not do on your PC due to the connectivity, the camera and the sensors. Everything changed when it came to price expectations.
Imagine if they had announced apps were coming for the iPhone, and potential customers waited for apps to come out and app developers waited for people to buy the phone.
Apple basically needed a take it or leave it strategy for the first release.
How do we know this was their actual strategic internal decision vs a practical one because an SDK for third party applications wasn’t ready yet or not important at launch?
Steve Jobs was very careful about the “Osborne effect”. Even if they had plans for an App SDK as part of the future iPhone roadmap, he would have never divulged it, to prevent customers from deffering purchases
Because of the WWDC events in which they touted their web-based API at the time as being all one needed to compete with Apple's own native apps. That turned out to be completely untrue and they backtracked.
That would have still been the right thing for them to say publicly if they did intend to release an SDK later though. Since it’s been a long time now, I’ve wondered if anyone’s spoken to their internal positioning.
Almost every platform seems to have believed in web apps at some point. Nokia did an attempt with Symbian, Palm had WebOS, Samsung tried that with Tizen, Apple with iPhones, Microsoft for Windows 8, Mozilla's Firefox OS...
I'm sure I forgot a few. All attempts failed quite completely.
Then they dragged their feet and kept Windows 2000 x86 only (I think - maybe they had an Itanium version) they had a half-ready x64 version of Windows XP
>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.
Further Microsoft killed Nokia's MeeGo OS in favor of Windows Phone OS, MeeGo was far capable than Android was at that time. Now telling that 'We should have done Android' sounds like convenient amnesia to put it lightly.
I would like to think, MeeGo survived in an alternate universe with Microsoft forming the 'Open handset alliance' instead of Google; but then that could mean intel taking a monopoly in smartphone chipset considering it was co-developer of MeeGo instead of ARM.
I like to have ARM where it is now, just for the sake of democratising computation. Full fledged linux on smartphones is taking shape in the form of SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch (UBPorts), postmarketOS etc. They could scale up with manufacturers like Pine releasing devices such as PinePhone.
Meanwhile, Google is moving away from Linux for their mobile devices with Fuchsia.
Even more ironic is that he had to revise that book just after its publication because in the 1st edition he totally missed what phenomenon the Internet was going to become.
He completely failed to understand, or even mention, the internet as it was then developing. Before we got shanghaied by adtech, and "social".
His small vision of the information highway was a world full of Encarta CDs and Micrsoft Windows services that you'd subscribe to.
The main memory of the book though is "oh boy, what a boring read". Some achievement at a time when computing was firmly in its most exciting period, before it became a commodity.
On slightly thinner ice, Microsoft was at the height of "embracing, extending and extinguishing" the browser and internet at the time of the book. They failed in good part from completely misunderstanding, presumably at management level, their target. I'm sure many individual MS engineers understood well enough.
The era when you could put an activeX component on the desktop, or embed it into a screen saver, and some network services like ftp wouldn't be distinguished from just opening an explorer window. A world of (mostly teased but not delivered) Windows services you'd subscribe to like a series of cable channels, and when sites still backed either Netscape or IE with little "made for..." icons. Which stopped because MS thought they were "finished" with IE 6.
[Edit: IE 6 was rather later and understood, but balkanised the internet. IE 1 and 2 were interesting. Sort-of compatible but available via an MS view of the world - as an extra cost option in the Windows Plus! pack for Win 95. It was only Win 95 after some service pack that included IE in base. I'm not sure when downloads started, but initially I don't think you could]
It's just incredible that MS has never understood how toxic the Windows brand is -- or, if not 'toxic', at least worthless. The only time the term Windows ever enters an ordinary user's vocabulary is when they call tech support to complain about something going wrong with their computer. (Or when a scammer calls them.)
It would be one thing if it were a branding mistake made by one CEO or one management team at one isolated point in time. But they have tried to turn Windows into a viable, positive consumer brand for longer than many of their customers have been alive. Time to run up the white flag on this one, guys. It's not going to happen.
Blue screen/ransomware is too strong, but the point is, Windows is like a carburator: if you’re thinking about it, you’re probably not having a good time. You want Windows to get out of your way so you can do the stuff. Windows is the loading screen.
Can't that second sentiment be said about almost all products? I want MacOS to get out of my way so I can do stuff, I want my Google TV to get out of the way so I can watch stuff, I want Samsung to get out of the way so I can use my tablet. I don't actively think "Wow I'm using an X product" until it breaks or fails, and that's the same with any brand not just windows. How can the Blue screen/ransomware be "too strong" if Microsoft is consistently in the top 5 most trusted brands?
Yes, it applies to a wide range. My usual go-to analogy it plumbing. You never see it, never think about it, until something goes wrong. From the user perspective, most technology is "plumbing".
I think where Apple excels is both in "getting out of the way" but also making the limited contact with plumbing that's necessary be a generally aesthetically pleasing experience. I still prefer Android and windows though.
I don't think Microsoft shares what their marketing team learns about their brands, but I'm not cold to this idea, and it would explain why all those scammers are introducing themselves as "Windows Support" instead of "Microsoft".
I'm projecting my experience with other users onto the broader population. The views and experiences of other people I know might not be representative, but it's not just my projection.
We are in the comment section of a niche tech forum though. Our views and those of the people we associate with will be far more critical of technology than the public, so I wouldn't make such grand statements as Windows == bluescreens and ransomware. Sure it has them, but it's far more associated with computers in general, which people need to do their work and daily activities.
So your saying that to a layman Windows is ubiquitous to a computer, and that somehow makes the brand worthless?
When you are talking about a Hoover, sure. Anyone can make a hoover, and the name looses all meaning and becomes a victim of its own success. That’s happening to Docker right now.
But Windows is different. Not anyone can make “a Windows”, because the difference between a computer and Windows is a lot more noticeable than the difference between one type of vacuum cleaner and another.
The link between Windows and a computer does make it harder to turn into some form of platform, sure, but it’s far, far, far from worthless.
You got the association off: It's not brand -> generic, it's "user has a problem" -> brand.
For non-techie people (most users), it was always "my computer" or "my PC" until they had a problem with it and had to think about "Windows". So yeah, as GP said, "Windows" did already have a negative reputation and was viewed as a necessary evil.
Particularly when the iPhone was released, Windows Vista had just come out a few months before.
>Windows Vista had just come out a few months before.
Yes, I know, Vista == awful. But I can never think too badly of it because I live through Windows ME, And when I think "worst Windows OS" everything else just kind of fades into the background.
It's overall an improving pattern though, with every other version being a step backwards, but not as big a step as the one before. Vista wasn't as bad as ME, Windows 8 wasn't as bad as Vista. At the same time, Windows 7 wasn't as much of an improvement on Vista as XP was over ME, and 10 not nearly as much of an improvement on 8 as 7 was on Vista.
Windows ME and Windows Vista were both terrible (it doesn't matter which one was worst), but that was because Windows XP and Windows 7 were also so good. So you start to notice the difference between the predecessor or successor which articulates the strong and weak points further.
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.
There is no Windows Tax for all practical purposes. The crapware that OEMs put on Windows PCs more than made up for the Windows license fee. Windows OEMs actually lose money selling consumer Linux computers since they don’t get the kickbacks from bundled software.
Besides that, if every company is paying the same amount for a Windows license, they all add it into the price of selling a PC.
Crapware is orthogonal to the Windows licence - if Linux had become popular with the general public then OEMs would have been just as happy to bundle crapware with their Linux boxes.
You're right that all OEMs pass the Windows licencing fee onto consumers, but consumers then respond by buying fewer computers, so it's still a hit to OEM profit.
The estimated $30 per computer that OEMs pay has nothing to do with consumers buying fewer PCs. Consumers are buying fewer PCs because of mobile and better single use devices like streaming boxes, smart TVs, and consoles.
Who was going to pay for crapware on Linux? Few PC consumers want computers without Windows just like few consumers want Android without Google Services.
Besides that, computers have been “good enough” for home use for awhile where they don’t need to be upgraded. Considering that most non gamers only use their home computers for Web+Office these days.
I just brought home an old Dell Inspiron Dual Core Pentium circa 2009 running Windows 7 (cleaned it up) with 4Gb of RAM and installed the latest version of Chrome and Office using one of my 6 available users. The only thing slow about is the spinning hard drive for what she needed.
In fact, Dell still sells low end laptops with lower resolution than my 10 year old Dell (1600x900), the same 4GB RAM, the same speed hard drive, and the same wireless technology - 802.11n 5Ghz.
While neither the built in Ethernet or WiFi can take advantage of my gig-e up/down. It’s still not a bottleneck for their crappy cable internet.
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.
It appears Windows 8 was developed for mobile first and then shoehorned onto the desktop version of the OS. On desktop it felt like an ugly, unpolished incomplete mess, two OS running side by side at the same time.
Windows 10 brought much more polish to the desktop, the modern apps integrate much better, more and more setting dialogs get ported to uwp.
But at the same time the mobile version of 10 felt less optimized than 8.1, almost like a compromise between desktop and mobile. While that helped getting closer to the goal of a unified experience between desktop and mobile, this was ultimately the wrong vision anyways. And ironically now that mobile is dead, what is even the point in continuing to transform Windows 10 away from win32 to uwp? I'm aware they still have the Xbox which also supports uwp apps but here I see even less of a reason to create this cross platform experience.
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.
In a perfect world, with nice roadmaps and planning and easy negotiations, yes Microsoft will develop hooks for you.
In the world where you have two months to get some ridiculous feature out because your competitor announced they’re doing it, it helps to just have the source code and throw engineers at the problem.
Sure, it does happen. The question is whether it happens frequently enough to satisfy OEMs desires for how often they want new API and how fast that API materializes.
And just having the source isn’t really enough. There are no StackOverflow articles on how to work with MS shared source code.
You’re thinking about best case scenarios, but markets move based on median case.
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.
I can't say I completely blame them. I had the Moto Qs and Samsung Blackjacks and loved them to death. I thought the initial iphone was silly...a phone without a keyboard, what a failure. In fairness, I still prefer a physical keyboard, but wow I was wrong in how far ahead iPhone was capability wise. So I guess I sympathize a bit.
I had a friend at work who'd been a big fan of the Nokia Communicators who got one of the early bastard phone/PDA/Windows CE spawn. Similar form factor to the communicator - sideways foldaway keyboard, but 99% of everything seemed to need the stylus. It even had a start button in the UI. HTC I think - this must have been back in the early 00s.
After he'd bought this thing there was... So. Much. Swearing. :)
From my recollection the only thing it did reliably was crash. A lot. An awful lot. Oh, and that the UI was comically fiddly.
He went back to the communicator, then later bought just a regular phone, the fancy Windows crashing thing became his in car map to run autoroute. It used to crash just running that.
A few of the guys in the office had used Compaq or HP PDAs and were keen on the idea of the then new Windows phones - his early adoption saved them all from an expensive mistake. Me? I stuck with the Psion 5. :)
I lusted after a few of those and eventually got an HP, around 2004. I loved the concept and could live with the stylus, but sync capabilities (ActiveSync, brr) were atrocious, even more so with anything non-Windows (I was on Linux at the time). Also it didn't have wifi, so I had to buy an expansion card, which stuck out very unsightly (and looked very fragile).
When the iPhone came out, I thought it was nice but overpriced, limited by not having expansion cards, and knee-capped by Apple's policy on rooting. It took me a couple of years to admit nobody really cared about those things.
no, those pda where at a price point. Jobs’ gamble and vision was that people would pay at multiples of that price point if the device was useful
To rephrase it, the issue wasn’t fundamentally technological it was an ingrained assumption at Ms, palm, Nokia that the price needs to be below x and Apple challenged that assumption in one risky Vision
Straight from wikipedia: "the device would require a triple layered capacitive multi-touch touch screen, a very new and advanced technology at the time."
The innovation was making the screen the only interface you needed, by pushing the boundaries of what it could do. There was no way to make screens do anything like this in 2001, when PDAs were around. By 2005, the tech was still advanced but mature enough to exploit it, and Apple did it to the fullest.
While I couldn’t find (while zapping some food) who innovated the screen on the iPhone 1 I’m not sure Apple did and neither did you prove otherwise (burden aside)
> MS invested a lot in PDAs, at a time when the tech just wasn’t good enough.
And they were not at all alone in that. A lot of us were totally blinded by that wave of PDAs and first experiments with tablets. E.g. I spent '98-'99 largely working on a tablet [1]. It was a beautiful piece of hardware for what we could do with the constraints, but those tradeoffs also all reflect the limitations that killed it:
The back "tube" held the batteries and doubled to lift the back slightly to make it easier to read the screen if you put it on a desk like a phone. But you could not get away from the fact it made it builky. It used a DECT (cordless phone standard) extension because wifi was not yet common, but of course the moment wifi took off nobody wanted that, and it had to get wifi.
We spent lots of effort writing a GUI toolkit for Nano-X (an compact little GUI engine with a somewhat X11 and somewhat Win32 API frontends [2] ), and contributing a bunch of code for Nano-X itself. And while Nano-X was excellent for what it was, all of that effort was down to memory and flash limitations (32MB RAM, 16MB flash), and meant applications had to be custom written, as while the API was X11-like it was not a direct match. And browser based apps was certainly not a option because that, well, it wasn't really much of a thing yet.
We spent ages with Opera getting them to port Opera to work under those constraints (to their credit the browser engine took very little time to retarget), though, and the results were great for the size of the device, but again it was a choice that was expensive for a small startup, but necessary because the device was so hardware-limited.
The bezels are massive partly because a bigger screen would have been too expensive, heavy and power hungry, partly to accomodate the rest of the board.
Touch was all resistive, because capacitative touch screens where not a viable option at the time.
The batteries didn't last long. Not that it mattered much, as you'd have to stay within a few hundred meters of your DECT base-station anyway, and so couldn't really take it out of the house.
And many more.
That it'd fail to get traction seems obvious now - it got geeks excited (especially because it ran Linux). I loved working on it. But just like "everyone" I knew had a Palm Pilot but Palm Pilots still didn't break through into the mainstream, this didn't get regular people excited either, and unlike Palm Pilot it didn't fit into a niche that had already gotten itself semi-established through a long range of previous devices (e.g. Palm Pilots gave mobile computing; FreePad didn't, and was too bulky anyway). We were not the only ones by far - e.g. Ericsson had a project to produce a Linux "screen phone". A bunch of others tried laptops with rotatable screens, or more directly tablet-like devices.
So when all of the various attempt to make the PDA and tablet markets break into the mainstream failed, and the iPhone then came, a lot of us looked at it with the eyes of someone who had seen it all before and we didn't spot what made it different:
This was suddenly a mass market consumer device rather than a niche techie device. We compared it to J2ME phones and complained about too few features, rather than comparing it to the vision of what we had wanted our devices to be (which was largely Star Trek or 2001 inspired - don't let anyone suggest this class of devices were invented this recently; we never thought the idea of that type of device was new) and spot that they'd done that, but had overcome enough of the worst limitations that the hardware constraints of the first wave of these devices had to deal with and designed something that would appeal on look and feel and capabilities to end-users, rather than appeal to super-early adopters.
To me it's one of those things that have made me much more cautious about judging new tech. Especially when I catch myself thinking "that's not new" I try to force myself to look for what is new about it, because it's so easy to judge something based on flaws of past implementations rather than by what the new iteration does differently.
[I just noticed at least some of the phone numbers on the dialler screenshot in the referenced article appears to be real; and most of the people listed were working on the project at the time, including me]
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.
In 1992 or so, I visualized a computer/watch hybrid device with image/video capture, wireless data, a touchscreen that didn't suck, apps that offloaded some of their work to remote servers, and voice communication. The image I had in my head looked a lot like a modern smartphone, but I imagined it worn around the wrist. I didn't imagine it as an evolution of the phone, but as a new class of device. There are products that allow a smartphone to be worn that way, but they aren't popular.
A couple years later, I imagined glasses that paired over a short-range wireless network with such a device to provide a wearable HUD, with a camera that did face recognition.
Of course, I was a kid at the time and didn't know how to build anything of the sort, demonstrating the principle of execution being far more important than ideas.
I only remember that doing video calls, but it may have been part of the inspiration. Star Trek's PADDs and touchscreen UIs were definitely part of it.
Screens, batteries, transistor density, they just weren't there in the 90s. Cordless phones were primary 49mhz analog for most of the decade. Electronics in general we're expensive
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.
There was a it significant first moved advantage for iPhone. For a couple of years, it was effectively the only game in town. That probably got people over a lot of friction
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.
It's not super clear to me if Microsoft made a mistake by not having a compatibility path for WinCE 6 applications on Windows Phone 7; the UI was completely different. Incidentally, you could write native code for WP7 with the WinCE tools.
I think the mistake was in doing the same thing for Windows Phone 8 and Windows Mobile 10. Yes, you could run an app built for the old platform on the new one, but in order to do it right, you had to rewrite everything to the new frameworks, and then maintain two seperate stacks. This fragmented the already small market share into even smaller pieces.
The other big mistakes were a) not allowing other browsers, given IE and later Edge aren't the best, b) focusing Windows Mobile 10 towards flagship phones and ignoring budget phones -- where they were actually doing well with WP 7 and 8, c) not making a good release of Windows Mobile 10 until a year after launch.
Indeed, I think backwards compatibility was actually a disadvantage, because it tempted app makers to want to use the same look and feel for devices that were too different for a single interface to work for both.
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.
As someone who owned a windows phone and switched to Android, the reason was simple - no apps. Everyone would advertise the latest thing as on iPhone and Droid, windows phone literally wasn't mentioned. I can't speak to the bigger picture but as far as I could see there was little reason to further spend money on a platform no one cared for.
But that happened because MS was late to the party, as parent poster said. By the time their “good” OS was ready, everyone was already writing apps for iOS and Android and nobody wanted yet another different platform to develop for. They tried hard to entice developers, even paying pretty good money, but it was just too late. Nokia had the same problem a bit earlier (well, among many other problems Nokia had...).
Many developers HATED Microsoft. The anti-Microsoft chant was at an all time high. Android developer registration fee was a ONE TIME FEE of (?). The Android operating system was just like Windows - anything goes, no restrictions!
How Microsoft lost Developers
Shitty & Successful VS Secure & Failure
Microsoft decided to recreate IOS because they'd been (and are still being) ridiculed for the security nightmare called Windows.
Balmer announced the developer fee and the scream (even here on HN) was enormous. Add the api restrictions and developers just said fuck it!
People on this thread are saying how nice it was to develop for Windows Phone compared to Android - bull. Screams about how you couldn't accomplish simple tasks - compared to Android was high. Till today, there are apps that show the message - due to Microsoft's restrictions (something) can't be accomplished - when the same thing was possible on IOS.
How Microsoft lost OEMs
Android was free. Windows Phone wasn't. OEMs could modify Android and add whatever crap they wanted to make pennies. But WP couldn't. You didn't need Google's permission to build an Android device. With WP - you couldn't.
MS gave preferential treatment to Nokia. Karma - MS's reputation With Windows bit it hard on the ass here.
How Microsoft lost Users
NOKIA - Nokia was in the habit of releasing this year's flagship with last year's specs. Only their cameras was worth something.
MS was SLOOW to respond to feature requests that IOS and Android got eons ago. Feature envy was high. Peeps celebrated addition of notification bar like the release of a new phone.
NIH syndrome - Apple and Google copied each other extensively and copied from Windows Phone when it made sense. WP stood like a statue
Pissing off developers resulted in fewer apps.
They couldn't survive writing brand new OSes 3 times. Windows phone 7 was different from CE. WP 8 - different from 7. And finally, 10 was different from 8.
There were minor issues Within sub versions. MS got the enmity of users who got burned and couldn't upgrade
Media, Influencers & Trolls
I don't know what these guys had against Microsoft however, their role in killing Wp can't be understated - and Microsoft/Nokia helped. Nokia kept releasing dated hardware - media ignored the fact that the OS didn't need it. In fact, at the time IOS devices ran lower clock speed and used 500mb ram.
Everything MS/Nokia did was SHIT and the same shit became gold whenever Apple ended up doing the same thing. Nokia was trolled for the camera bulge on Lumia 920, but that's what companies are doing right now. The Lumia 920 weighed 180g and was called the "BRICK." They said 920 was best used as a weapon against burglars. Fast forward to iPhone XS Max which weighs 208g and they love it. They hated the flat design on WP but loved it when Apple co-opted it.
Everyone loves wireless Charging but Nokia was trolled for it.
This intense media hate made fans create windowsphone central and microsoft-news to balance the emotion.
The final nail in the curtain was the interface. WP was very intuitive to smart phone virgins. However for people already corrupted by Android and IOS, WP was alien, weird and difficult to use.
Lumia 920 had a 4.5in screen size and iPhone XS Max is a ginormous phablet with a 6.5in screen. Lesson of this entire post: you can’t release things that have feature parity and worse specifications, but specifications aren’t a barrier when you’re providing features.
A former coworker once said that MS reps came to his school around 2013 and paid students to write apps and submit them to the windows store. He even gave them a sample app and said "copy and paste this into a new project and submit it with a different name, we'll give you $500". They were just trying to pad the number of apps in the store to compete with Google and Apple lol
As far as I remember the dev tools for Windows Phone weren't free back then. I think this was another reason why a lot of hobbyists didn't touch Windows Phone.
I don't think Bill Gates loses much sleep at night over the multi-decadal, multi-centigigabuck cash volcano that Windows was and remains for Microsoft.
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 agree with everything you've said except for the UI being bad.
If this was desktop I would agree with you. Having a good start menu makes sense and the Unity (at least usable) and then Windows 8 (abomination) show that a UI like that doesn't always make sense outside phones and tablets.
The flip of this is true as well. For a phone, my uses are far less complex. I don't have a zillion folders, apps, programming environments, mapped drives...etc. I need internet, SMS, camera, email, office apps, and that is about it. With Windows Phone I had that on my fully customized home screen with all the icons sized just the way I wanted them. I also liked that searching for apps was just slide to the right and scroll by alphabetical order. With Android there is just so much crap going on that I don't use that gets in the way. Now I'm sure some people do use it, but I do not.
My wife had a Nokia Lumia Windows phone as well. She likes the fact that there is better support and apps on Android than what we had with Windows (especially at the end), but she really misses the Windows UI and she had Android for many years before going Windows.
Today I do backend work mainly in Linux environments and occasionally some Android, but I still remember my first internship doing Windows Phone development.
It was amazing. The lockstep integration with Visual Studio was head and shoulders above Android and iOS, even to this day. They did JavaScript for native dev via WinJS well before React Native was a thing. I found the tile-based UI refreshingly different and visually appealing. I'm not sure that the world would be better off with Microsoft as a major player in the smartphone space but they definitely created a great operating system.
Thanks. That sounds right...it has been many years to where the spirit of what I was trying to say still fit, but let me clear it up:
When Windows Phone7 came out, my friend had a budget WindowsPhone7 with a single core that outperformed dual-core Android at the time when it came to being a phone. The WP7 was a lot less laggy. Then when I got my first Windows Phone8 it was dual-core instead of the then Android quad-cores and it out performed those as well in anecdotal comparisons of mine.
I had a Palm Pre. When it finally died, switching to android was a major step backwards (FWIW, Android has caught up at this point). It was an amazing phone in its day, and reasonably easy to develop for. The OS very nearly got a second life with HP before the CEO got fired for sexual harassment.
> 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.
Rubbish. Their CE phones were awful, and lots of people hated Micrsofts Windows phones and their laggy tiles.
In around 2012 we had a couple of smart phones at work for evaluation. The Windows phone made the most rounds because everyone was amazed at how bad it was. We would hand it to colleagues who hadn't seen it yet and watch them struggle and curse while trying to do even the most basic tasks. The platform was Windows 7, I think.
It does sadden me a bit that they don't make their own software anymore. For productivity it's so hard to beat their older OS and even OS10 is slick (I still use it today). It was strange though because their architecture supports android apps but you can't download them out-of-the-box.
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.
Yeah, it is an especially silly statement because Blackberry and Apple ios both existed at the time Android came out, so obviously it was NOT fundamentally a winner-take-all market. He kind of backwards-admits this by calling it the "non-Apple" market.
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.)
One of the biggest examples of how a leader of technical people will influence their performance by either bringing them up toward a lofty leadership level, or in the case where a leadership position is held by a party less technically qualified than the ones they are in a position to lead, the performance will be ground down to the lesser level, with the relative bozoness becoming more prominent than the underlying technical ability of the workforce through time.
Even with smaller "organizations" or institutions the momentum of the time factor involved when reversing between wisdom and foolishness can really obscure the true sources of the wisdom or foolishness to begin with.
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.
Clippy was the brainchild of Microsoft employee Melinda French whom later changed her name to Melinda Gates. needless to say, Bill is not going to admit that one...
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.
Perhaps all the lawsuits (or I guess one lawsuit that has been going on for more than a decade with all the appeals). At this point I'm sure it would have been cheaper to acquire Sun than to drag this out and still potentially face fines in the billions.
> You know, in the software world, in particular for platforms, these are winner-take-all markets. ...There’s room for exactly one non-Apple operating system
Would there be a general rule here that he is not thinking of? The general rule being that there is only room for 1 closed-source platform?
I can imagine that the winner of the closed-source platform race will be the team that doesn't take vacations of weekends, but does the same hold for the open source alternative platform? It seems to me that speed is less essential in the open source world and that it's more of a long-term battle.
Lots of variables what can change that duo dominance theory. For example when China closes their borders and grow their own phone OS and at the same time spread it in Africa and South America. Not unlikely to happen.
Microsoft owned the smartphone market with CE, once palm went under. But they let it languish. You can see this happening today with Google's decisions to pull out of tablets, and close a number of products.
Now that Android is what it's become my biggest disappointment with Microsoft is that Nadella killed Windows Phone. Having used Android for close to two years now it blows my mind how bad Android UX is, given it's age, and how insanely good Windows Phone was, given IT'S age.
Not even starting to talk about the privacy side of it.
Gates was clear in the interview, that it only applied to him. He said "for my makeup" it was applicable. He also explained that he believed: "it was possible to over mythologize the idea of working extremely hard." He also said point-blank that he doesn't recommend it.
That's the only correct position to take. Quite simply to each their own. Who is anyone else to tell me how to spend my hours? Gates is careful to make a distinction between projecting how others should be, and stating how he chose to be.
Some people work better in short bursts. Some people work better in sprints with longer breaks in between. That's why I don't feel bad when I work hard for a few weeks and slack off for a bit afterwards. I'll never personally understand the idea of a strict 9-5. It seems to go completely against everything I've learned about people in my life.
> It seems to go completely against everything I've learned about people in my life.
Have you ever met people with children?
Generally, strict hours enable simple, well-defined coordination with others. You often _need_ that kind of agreement when others are taking care of your children in your behalf, e. g. schoolteachers, partners, grandparents.
I'm pretty sure that everyone on the planet will agree with him that if you are a founder you can't expect 40 hour work weeks if you want the company to get somewhere.
MS is still making the mistake of not pushing the Laptop-Tablet combo device. The "Surface Pro" series are ideal for merging Laptop+Tablet+Phone devices. In this day and age, i do NOT want to carry three devices but NEED a multi-functional device.
Another huge mistake was they tried to incentivize app development instead of good app development. There were good apps on the windows phone, but it had so much rubbish the good apps were hard to find.
As opposed to the fart apps on iOS? No there were rubbish apps on all other platforms just that Apple created the iFund to promote startups based on apps and Google also had issues with app quality and quantity early too.
Feels like there is an opportunity cost to not have time off early on in your life. Even if you somehow end up a billionaire later, you can't get your twenties and early thirties back.
With android we can at
least replace few parts, and get a functional unix terminal even without root. If you can degoogle and / or root, android is great.
It seems[0] that the Android bought by Google was a camera OS with cloud storage. Not a phone, nor did it have apps. All that came from Google, and was being developed before the iPhone was announced.
If you read Battle of the Titans, you'll see Android was left to its own devices once acquired, so you could say it was a team that what would eventually build the Android we know, regardless of who bought it. Google contributed cash but didn't do anything Microsoft couldn't if they had acquired them.
Completely disagree. Google shared mobile search ad revenue with carriers and device makers using Android OS. Microsoft couldn't (as a matter of practicality) offer that advantage.
Fair enough, but do be careful of founder revisionist history. Independent research is usually better at digging up company origins than the "tales from the inside" that founders tout. (Though I'm not disputing the revenue split advantage)
I don’t understand. Are you saying you’re unbothered by the disingenuous use of unlimited vacation policies by start-ups and others seeking to avoid payouts on unused PTO while also creating a culture that implicitly pressures workers to take less vacation?
I’m not making a normative judgment about your comment (for example, you are clear that it’s totally down to your personal use of the vacation policy, and that you don’t consider how it affects others when deciding whether to be bothered by it ... this is not bad or good, just one particular way to attach an evaluation to the policy). I’m just asking to clarify b/c it’s not clear to me which aspect of my comment you’re replying to.
> Are you saying you’re unbothered by the disingenuous use of unlimited vacation policies by start-ups and others seeking to avoid payouts on unused PTO while also creating a culture that implicitly pressures workers to take less vacation?
I am saying that I am unbothered by exploiting an exploitative system that is not internally consistent.
If a company tells me unlimited vacation, that means unlimited vacation. If they tell me two weeks it means two weeks. If I am expected to infer that a policy is the opposite of what it says, then how can I remain sane?
What do you do in a company that tells you “unlimited vacation” but then takes subtle retaliatory or punitive action towards you, in ways fully insulated from any kind of worker appeal for wrongdoing?
Usually you’ll be pressured not to take much vacation, and passed over for promotion or raises, etc., if you don’t comply, and they’ll just manage you out, probably feeling happy when you eventually quit or something.
A lot of people are also stuck in the sense that they don’t have the financial freedom or job market liquidity to quit because of this, and are essentially forced to accept it or else go unemployed.
This is disturbing. One of the wealthiest and most successful businessmen in the world is still beating himself up about missing out on one important market, mobile phones.
That is strange, but what is most disturbing is how he is utterly certain that Microsoft deserved to have that market, that it would be better if Microsoft dominated that market as well, and that Microsoft missed out on that market because of high-level managerial errors, not because people didn't like Windows phone.
what is most disturbing is how he is utterly certain that Microsoft deserved to have that market
Words you're putting in his mouth. He did not say anything about deserving or certainty; when he says "we did screw up" that's an acknowledgement they had to compete for it, and failed to do that. People who think they deserve things, don't think they have to work hard and compete for them, and they don't reflect on what they did wrong but instead get affronted that the universe didn't simply hand them what the still feel they deserve.
> 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.
It's not quite a sense of entitlement, but Gates definitely thinks Microsoft could have won mobile if Microsoft made better decisions. He doesn't seem to be leaving much room for the idea that Google would have won even if Microsoft had done its best.
Microsoft had been building consumer hardware and software (X-Box, Pocket-PC, Windows Mobile) since ~2000 and Windows XP Tablet edition since 2002, and Zune, just about before iPhone. They owned the frontend on desktop and mobile, office and consumer. They had Exchange ActiveSync, one of the few possible competitors for Blackberry messaging, and they had hardware makers on board - just look at the list of companies which made Windows PocketPC devices, and the number of devices out for literally years before Google moved in the market at all:
It took them three years after iPhone to pivot to something multi-touch, (Windows Phone 7 in late 2010) and on release it had the limitations of the original iPhone release - no copy/paste, no custom rintones - and five years to get something with Windows NT kernel to compete with Apple's "It runs OS X".
If Microsoft had made better decisions, i.e. done what Apple did, and released a multitouch full-not-hobbled-software device as soon as the hardware was up to it, tuning Microsoft hardware and software together like they do now with the Surface range, there wouldn't have been a market gap for Google to enter.
And when Google did enter, the first Android released was the HTC Dream - coming out 18 months after iPhone release - and 6 months after iPhone had been discontinued and superceded - and being designed like a device from 2003. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Dream
If you'd asked people in 2005 who were the contenders for dominating the next decade of consumer mobile computing, what would they say? Would anyone seriously suggest Google anymore than Yahoo! or AOL or Compuserve?
Yes, it's a high-level managerial error (or a series of them) to make a phone that people don't like. Management's job in that situation is 1) figure out what people will want and 2) make what they want.
I think that Microsoft may not have been able to do that within their existing form. People didn't want Windows on a phone; they wanted a phone with apps. Microsoft probably tied the phone too much to existing Windows, whereas Android was much more tuned to writing apps for phones.
In the 80s, people wanted a desktop with apps, and Microsoft solved for that by just letting everyone make any app they wanted and not playing gatekeeper.
An MS phone using that model would be interesting. No app store. Just go ahead and run any random app you find on the internet. Probably a security nightmare.
But MS used a similar strategy to challenge Apple once before and did really well, security issues notwithstanding. So I'm kind of surprised they didn't make the same play.
He threatened OEMs into refusing to even offer better software from his competitors. He won a contest by rigging it, and then seems surprised that he couldn't win another contest on merit, like a mafia don who thought he was a legitimate businessman.
Indeed. Microsoft engaging in said behaviour with Compaq over beOS was directly responsible for my exploration of and ultimate preference for non-MS platforms in all things.
It's telling that marketing / branding / repuation doesn't factor into his internal model of Android vs. Windows phone.
At the time, google was doing a good job of branding itself ("do no evil") as an open, transparent (at least in terms of source code) and interoperable member of the community.
(oh how times / perceptions have changed...)
So google and had a lot of good faith with developers who were unhappy with Microsoft's ethics/business practices, browser war schennanigans, etc...
This played no small role in Android's early adoption and ultimate success.
Exactly! In my viewpoint, Microsoft had a terrible name. Windows 9x was unstable and a security nightmare (sure, it was cheap compared to UNIX desktops). Windows NT was more stable, and more secure, but it still had MSIE and ActiveX and MS Office which were all security nightmares. They might've worked well because they never took security serious. Eventually, the latter bit Microsoft in the ass.
Linux had a different name. Arguably, a better one. One of the weaknesses was software compatibility and UI complexity. Android didn't suffer from the former (as all of that was fixed before phone shipped), and tried to limit the latter with a new UI from the ground up (no X/KDE/GNOME etc).
Companies such as Google and Facebook take security serious. Because they're data driven companies, they want to protect that vehemently.
Once the pieces of the pie are cut out, its extremely hard to get even a small part of the pie. Linux desktop was too late, Windows Phone was too late. Why? Apps/ecosystem. I mean, Windows to this date still barely has a way to update software like Linux had for more than 20 years (APT, for example). You need either Windows Store or a third party one such as Chocolatey or Scoop.
Google did the same thing until the EU forced it not to. It wouldn’t allow a manufacturer to sell both a Google certified Android phone and an open source AOSP phone without Google Services.
I’m glad I’m not alone in feeling that. I watched what happened, literally competed against them in the 90’s. Recently I’ve been thinking they’d changed a lot, Edge on non-windows, Linux friendliness in windows 10 and azure, etc.. even kicking around the idea of picking up a windows lapper to kick the tires on. I got chills by this. I don’t think I’ll be getting that laptop for a while.
It’s a winner takes all world because that’s how they played the game and they made it that way. We actually had quite a bit of plurality before Windows, the UNIX world put in a tremendous amount of effort to have open standards so you could reasonably build software for multiple platforms. Sun built Java for that world. The industry seemed remarkably open to multiple platforms, which isn’t without problems either, but I think I might like it if we had a few more serious mobile players
I should have clarified that to be Chromebook and Android.
End of the day, the Microsoft ecosystem just dominated client tech utterly. The previous king of mobile, Blackberry, was basically a hardware version of Microsoft Outlook.
They had tablets and phones years ago, but chose to position them as shitty PCs instead of real devices. Internet Explorer for Windows CE was a steaming pile of shit that has it been something better would have changed many things.
Today Microsoft is in trouble and is running on inertia. In many ways Apple owns higher ed. Google completely dominates K-12. The Windows 10 strategy is designed to make IT people in enterprises fail.
Google bought Android and was converting it into a phone OS years before iPhone was announced [0].
While the original hardware looks more like a Blackberry, and was definitely influenced by the iPhone afterwards, it's also wrong to say we wouldn't have gotten Android without the iPhone.
Surely they would have just gone with the original KHTML or some Gecko-based thing instead. I don't think we wouldn't have Chrome, just that it may look different.
Ugh. This is somehow going to get translated into “vacation = failure” and thats a tragedy. Im used to a culture of 2 weeks max a year because thats whats legally required, and that amount of time gives you no time to reflect, no time to relax, and little time to come up with unique ways to solve problems. I really hope this was taken out of context.
Enjoy your two-weeks. A lot of companies in the valley now have "No Allocated Vacation" - which, in many scenarios, means you get Christmas off and that's about it for quite a stretch. (And also, of course, means they don't have to pay out your vacation when you leave - as you never had any coming to you)
What's worse is they call it "open" vacation leave and sell it as a perk. Sometimes they even do this with paternal leave as well, selling it as a perk.
It really does show there is something sick in the culture when companies sell it and workers accept it.
I assume you're taking a dig at "unlimited vacation".
You should really redirect your anger at your company culture.
We have "unlimited vacation" where I work.
Even a couple years back when things were not looking good most people took about 4wk which in practice is more like 5wk if you utilize the days off we get before/after major holidays. It's common for the H1Bs to pick a random month and use that time to go home to visit family. I took 3wk or so and it came up in my performance review and I was encouraged to take more if I wanted to. It's not just my team that's like this either.
One of the many reasons I prefer to do tech somewhere other than the overpriced west coast meat grinders.
Companies have "No Allocated" vacation (By no stretch of the imagination is it unlimited) - for exactly one reason - so they don't have to carry the pay-out liability on their books.
But, an ugly side effect, is because there is no allocation, there is also no forcing function for people to "use-it-or-lose-it" - which also means when you are in crunch-time (which defines every startup I've ever worked for in the first 4-5 years) - it effectively means no vacation, excepting Christmas, which still seems to be untouchable (so far).
In those cases its dependent on the local jurisdiction. If the state of California or the USA - Im not aware - has no minimum vacation time guarantees then yeah. But if that guarantee exists an employer cannot make up their own rules.
Interesting to contrast this with the current HN article link to the Washingtonian about Amazon choosing Virginia for the HQ2 location. That article references Moretti’s “The New Geography of Jobs” - companies now seek human capital rather than accumulating physical capital.
His greatest mistake was allowing UX and quality of the windows platform to descend into the plague that it was for the better part of 2 decades. I can't imagine a world where my phone were as unreliable and vulnerable as, say, windows Vista.
You are getting downvoted, but there's truth in what you say. Microsoft's idea of a phone OS was always simply a port of Windows. If fact their early efforts failed in part because they insisted on making it a port of Windows.
it's also telling how Gates' phrasing implies a false dichotomy where there's Apple's platform plus room for only one other competitor. The only reason it's that way now is because of abuse of patent law and other anti-competitive business practices. We could just as easily live in a world where there are 6 proprietary mobile OS vendors plus several open source versions built on easily-interchangeable interfaces (thanks to FTC-mandate) all vying to be #1 among onsumers by offering the best UX and features. To me, his language indicates he can't even comprehend a world where MS has to compete on a level playing field by developing a superior technology that users prefer.
I would say that, even if windows Vista had been great as a desktop/laptop OS, making a mobile phone OS that is based on a microcomputer OS is a mistake, not likely to go well.
Apple did not try to make ios a clone of Mac's OS.
The UI is what I meant, but sure, the underlying mechanisms might be the same. If they do, in fact, unify ios and Mac OS UI, I expect that one or the other will no longer work as well. Given their current priorities, it seems more likely that their Mac OS will suffer, rather than ios.
I would have agreed with you before WWDC. But most of the old school Mac developers are saying that both SwiftUI and Catalyst (aka Marzipan) give you all of the tools you need to make a great Mac app and that the TV app that was built using Catalyst is indistinguishable from the podcast and music apps that are regular old AppKit apps.
That wasn't Gates, it was Steve Ballmer. In an interview a decade later after this one he acknowledged to an interviewer that it might have been a mistake.
One error Gates later admitted making was not buying Allaire Corp because he thought the price was too high. His own staff members argued with him on that one. But after Allaire was sold to Macromedia J.J. Allaire started the company Onfolio with some friends from Allaire. Gates insisted after launch that Ballmer purchase it, primarily to acquire the services of J.J. Allaire.
During his time at Microsoft he created Windows LiveWriter and I've been told also worked on the creation of Azure. He left Microsoft and founded RStudio.
Personal attacks will get you banned on Hacker News. You may not owe better to Bill Gates, but you owe better to this community if you want to post here.
Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines and sticking to their spirit from now on? We'd be grateful.
I get flagged for asking a question and asserting something I believe to be true, meanwhile you allow others to ask questions and assert things they believe to be true? I invite folks to argue against what I have said, but microsoft has a long history of buying/chewing up competition, riping off users, etc.
This is equivalent to complaining that you got a speeding ticket when you saw other cars also speeding.
We don't come close to seeing all the comments, and can't moderate what we don't see. If you see a particularly bad one unmoderated, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. Flag it or email us at hn@ycombinator.com. But don't treat other comments as an excuse to break the site guidelines yourself; it doesn't work that way.
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.