In a recent interview at Village Global, a venture capital firm, Microsoftโs co-founder Bill Gates revealed that missing theย Androidย opportunity to Google was his โgreatest mistake everโ.
Gates said that by allowing Google to develop Android even before Microsoft could develop a competing mobile operating system cost the company nearly $400 billion.
“In the software world, particularly for platforms, these are winner-take-all markets. So the greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that causedย Microsoftย not to be whatย Androidย is. That is, Android is the standard non-Appleย phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win,” Gates told Eventbrite co-founder and CEO Julia Hartz.
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“If you’re there with half as many apps or 90 percent as many apps, you’re on your way to complete doom. 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),” he highlighted.
Gates also partially blames Microsoftโs lengthy antitrust battle with U.S. authorities in the early 2000โs that allowed Google to get ahead.
We were in the field of doing operating systems for personal computers. We knew that mobile phones would be very popular,” Gates said.
“We missed being the dominant mobile operating system by a very tiny amount. We were distracted during our antitrust trial. We didn’t assign the best people to do the work.”
He added that the failure in mobile was “the biggest mistake I made” at Microsoft because it was “clearly within our skill set.”
“We were clearly the company that should have achieved that, and we didn’t. Android is a huge asset for Google.”
Despite Gatesโ blunder,ย Microsoft is currently the world’s most valuable company with a market capitalization of over $1 trillion.
โItโs amazing to me, having made one of the greatest mistakes of all time…our other assets like Windows and Office are still very strong, so we are a leading company. If we had gotten that one right, we would be the leading company, but oh well,” he added.
Gates also praised the current chief executiveย Satya Nadella for helping reshape Microsoft and bringing it to the position where it is today.
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He, however, pointed out Microsoft along with other big software firms made a mistake by allowing Amazon to become the top cloud computing firm through its Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.
“It is a surprise and it’s a huge credit toย (Amazon CEO) Jeff Bezosย and his team that they got out in front and with AWS did the best cloud product,” Gates said.
“Today Microsoft is a strong number two… (but) there are many companies including Microsoft that should feel bad” for not being able to get ahead of Amazon in the cloud.