12 ms·

Bill Gates on making “one of the greatest mistakes of all time”

210 points by chdaniel 7y ago

thinkingkong 7y ago
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.
- craftyguy 7y ago
  How? 30-something year old Bill was quite successful, and he continued to be successful.
- ghshephard 7y ago
  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)
  - Stratoscope 7y ago
    > "No Allocated Vacation" Of course, they don't call it that, they call it "unlimited vacation." And yes, it means exactly what you said, whatever name it goes by.
  - dleslie 7y ago
    That's horrendous.
    - magicbuzz 7y ago
      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.
  - steve19 7y ago
    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.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    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.
    - ghshephard 7y ago
      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).
  - thinkingkong 7y ago
    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. Either way it sounds ridiculous.
JudgeWapner 7y ago
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.
- TwoBit 7y ago
  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.
  - pier25 7y ago
    > they insisted on making it a port of Windows They rushed it and used Windows CE when they realized they were too far behind.
  - JudgeWapner 7y ago
    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.
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  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.
  - scarface74 7y ago
breck 7y ago
> 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.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > The general rule being that there is only room for 1 closed-source platform? But this isn’t true at all for desktop computing: both macOS and Windows share the majority of the market.
- holoduke 7y ago
  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.
  - walshemj 7y ago
    Will they actually develop from scratch or just clone android?
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      It's already done. https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3001685/huawei-confirms-it-has-built-its-own-operating-system-just-case-us https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3001685/huawei-co...
lazyjones 7y ago
Looks like he‘d agree with Jack Ma about „sacrifices“ in early years... Let’s see how much flak he‘ll get for that.
- adventured 7y ago
  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.
  - lovehashbrowns 7y ago
    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.
    - tcard 7y ago
      > 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.
- paxys 7y ago
  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.
FatalLogic 7y ago
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.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  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.
  - brownbat 7y ago
    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.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  It truly was a epic screwup. Without iPhone, you wouldn’t have Chrome or android.
  - pier25 7y ago
    > Without iPhone, you wouldn’t have Chrome or android. How is that?
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
Just imagine combining this attitude with start-up unlimited vacation policies.
- 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
  Unlimited vacation is literal for me. I will abuse the shit out of it until told otherwise. Quite frankly, it doesn’t bother me one bit.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    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.
    - 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
      > 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?
      - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
        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.
MickerNews 7y ago
What a complete failure of a human being he is. Super successful businessman through viscous, cutthroat sharp practice but an awful person. No matter how he tries to reinvent his image. Some of us older people remember who he is.
- corndoge 7y ago
  This seems hyperbolic in the context of BMGF. The man has, by proxy, done worlds of good with the money flowing there.
  - craftyguy 7y ago
    > worlds of good Besides the bill and melinda foundation, which is funded by virtual blood money, what other good have they done?
    - dang 7y ago
      Please keep the denunciatory rhetoric off this site. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - craftyguy 7y ago
        Double standards much here on Dang "News"? 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.
        dang 7y ago
        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.
6thaccount2 7y ago
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.
- eightysixfour 7y ago
  I know a few folks that bought backups and run them to this day.
- megaremote 7y ago
  > 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.
  - mehrdada 7y ago
    The laggy tiles were much much better than Android at the time, which was complete garbage till v4 or so.
  - dleslie 7y ago
    Windows Phone and CE were very different experiences. I agree, CE was something of a dumpster fire.
  - AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
    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.
tammer 7y ago
More specifically the obvious management error here was (tremendously) underestimating the iPhone as a product. I remember the comments from Microsoft calling it an overpriced toy, while Google was crafting their Android strategy early. Gates appears too bitter to acknowledge this.
- rmason 7y ago
  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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U 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.
nine_k 7y ago
All users of windows phone I know liked it, some outright loved it. It got a number of design decisions right. Lumia hardware was good, and the camera was more than excellent. Software was lacking but it could be improved to maturity. Too bad we now have two players and not three or four (blackberry). This is indeed not because of lack of engineering prowess or customer interest.
- edoceo 7y ago
  BlackBerry still out here making good hardware, runs Android tho. I love the KeyOne&Two, they are awesome business device.
  - Phillipharryt 7y ago
    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.
HillRat 7y ago
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.
- millstone 7y ago
  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.
  - irq 7y ago
    > 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.
    - bobsil1 7y ago
      Yup, it was going to be an embedded, first-party personal organizer.
    - 7y ago
megaremote 7y ago
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.
CPLX 7y ago
Sounds to me like the antitrust actions were effective. The world would not be a better place if MS had overwhelming mobile market share or had won the browser wars.
simonblack 7y ago
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.
- hacker_9 7y ago
  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.
  - toyg 7y ago
    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...).
    - vezycash 7y ago
      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.
WalterBright 7y ago
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.
- toyg 7y ago
  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.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    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. :)
m0zg 7y ago
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.
apo 7y ago
> 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.
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  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.
JamesBarney 7y ago
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.
- r00fus 7y ago
  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.
im_down_w_otp 7y ago
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.
ryenus 7y ago
> In fact, Gates is still kicking himself for taking his eyes off the ball and allowing Google to develop Android And those in Google are probably also kicking themselves for taking their eyes off the ball and allowing Oracle to acquire Sun
- zaphirplane 7y ago
  Whatever for would google want sun. Java is open source, Solaris and sparc are struggling
  - Phillipharryt 7y ago
    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.
RickJWagner 7y ago
Disappointed. I thought it was Clippy.
- Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
  And I thought it was his hubris in trying to fix American education without knowing really anything about it.
- cultofmetatron 7y ago
  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...
Ari_Ugwu 7y ago
All of this paved the way for Nadella. I count it as a net gain.
netwanderer3 7y ago
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.
Bakary 7y ago
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.
- leesalminen 7y ago
  I gave my twenties to the tech startup founder life. I won’t be giving my thirties to it.
jarjoura 7y ago
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.
- jeremyjh 7y ago
  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.
  - aetherson 7y ago
    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
kerng 7y ago
Google didn't invent Android, they bought it. Maybe Microsoft's big mistake was to let that happen.
- Izkata 7y ago
  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. [0] https://www.androidauthority.com/history-android-os-name-789433/ https://www.androidauthority.com/history-android-os-name-789...
  - Phillipharryt 7y ago
    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.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      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.
      - Phillipharryt 7y ago
        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)
zmmmmm 7y ago
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.
- la_barba 7y ago
  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.
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    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.
    - la_barba 7y ago
      >In a perfect world, with nice roadmaps and planning and easy negotiations, yes Microsoft will develop hooks for you. I don't why you think this is some pie in the sky fantasy. What I said is _already_ happening. This is normal stuff. For e.g. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ Or specifically - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/windows-embedded-ce-licensing-program.aspx https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/windows-embedde...
rramadass 7y ago
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.
- scarface74 7y ago
  And you have compromises. Windows sucks as a tablet OS.
espeed 7y ago
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 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-America [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again#Social_media_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again#Socia...
- Phillipharryt 7y ago
  Though funnily two of those 4 are founded by foreigners, both sons of immigrants (and Sergey is himself one).
gesman 7y ago
Biggest mistake was to let Ballmer to stall Microsoft progress, creativity and business for a decade. Say it, Bill
- fuzzfactor 7y ago
  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.
kazinator 7y ago
> 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.
snarky-ftfy 7y ago
Letting Steve Ballmer take control of the company. FTFY
topkai22 7y ago
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.
- polyomino 7y ago
  It wasn't free they got paid. Google shared mobile search revenue with manufacturers.
joshanderson 7y ago
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.
MrQuincle 7y ago
Actually I expected this to be about his current activities. What would be his largest mistake with respect to effective altruism? A mistake there is about the life or death of thousands of people. Maybe more.
Spearchucker 7y ago
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.
tellme_throwa 7y ago
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. And BillG didn't deserve it...
thelazydogsback 7y ago
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.)

210 points by chdaniel 7y ago

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.

craftyguy 7y ago
How? 30-something year old Bill was quite successful, and he continued to be successful.
ghshephard 7y ago
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)
- Stratoscope 7y ago
  > "No Allocated Vacation" Of course, they don't call it that, they call it "unlimited vacation." And yes, it means exactly what you said, whatever name it goes by.
- dleslie 7y ago
  That's horrendous.
  - magicbuzz 7y ago
    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.
- steve19 7y ago
  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.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  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.
  - ghshephard 7y ago
    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).
- thinkingkong 7y ago
  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. Either way it sounds ridiculous.

JudgeWapner 7y ago

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.

TwoBit 7y ago
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.
- pier25 7y ago
  > they insisted on making it a port of Windows They rushed it and used Windows CE when they realized they were too far behind.
- JudgeWapner 7y ago
  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.
rossdavidh 7y ago
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.
- scarface74 7y ago

breck 7y ago

> 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.

saagarjha 7y ago
> The general rule being that there is only room for 1 closed-source platform? But this isn’t true at all for desktop computing: both macOS and Windows share the majority of the market.
holoduke 7y ago
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.
- walshemj 7y ago
  Will they actually develop from scratch or just clone android?
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    It's already done. https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3001685/huawei-confirms-it-has-built-its-own-operating-system-just-case-us https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3001685/huawei-co...

lazyjones 7y ago

Looks like he‘d agree with Jack Ma about „sacrifices“ in early years... Let’s see how much flak he‘ll get for that.

adventured 7y ago
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.
- lovehashbrowns 7y ago
  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.
  - tcard 7y ago
    > 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.
paxys 7y ago
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.

FatalLogic 7y ago

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.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
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.
- brownbat 7y ago
  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.
Spooky23 7y ago
It truly was a epic screwup. Without iPhone, you wouldn’t have Chrome or android.
- pier25 7y ago
  > Without iPhone, you wouldn’t have Chrome or android. How is that?

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

Just imagine combining this attitude with start-up unlimited vacation policies.

0x8BADF00D 7y ago
Unlimited vacation is literal for me. I will abuse the shit out of it until told otherwise. Quite frankly, it doesn’t bother me one bit.
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  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.
  - 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
    > 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?
    - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
      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.

MickerNews 7y ago

What a complete failure of a human being he is. Super successful businessman through viscous, cutthroat sharp practice but an awful person. No matter how he tries to reinvent his image. Some of us older people remember who he is.

corndoge 7y ago
This seems hyperbolic in the context of BMGF. The man has, by proxy, done worlds of good with the money flowing there.
- craftyguy 7y ago
  > worlds of good Besides the bill and melinda foundation, which is funded by virtual blood money, what other good have they done?
  - dang 7y ago
    Please keep the denunciatory rhetoric off this site. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - craftyguy 7y ago
      Double standards much here on Dang "News"? 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.
      - dang 7y ago
        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.

6thaccount2 7y ago

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.

eightysixfour 7y ago
I know a few folks that bought backups and run them to this day.
megaremote 7y ago
> 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.
- mehrdada 7y ago
  The laggy tiles were much much better than Android at the time, which was complete garbage till v4 or so.
- dleslie 7y ago
  Windows Phone and CE were very different experiences. I agree, CE was something of a dumpster fire.
- AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
  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.

tammer 7y ago

More specifically the obvious management error here was (tremendously) underestimating the iPhone as a product. I remember the comments from Microsoft calling it an overpriced toy, while Google was crafting their Android strategy early. Gates appears too bitter to acknowledge this.

rmason 7y ago
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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U 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.

nine_k 7y ago

All users of windows phone I know liked it, some outright loved it. It got a number of design decisions right. Lumia hardware was good, and the camera was more than excellent. Software was lacking but it could be improved to maturity. Too bad we now have two players and not three or four (blackberry). This is indeed not because of lack of engineering prowess or customer interest.

edoceo 7y ago
BlackBerry still out here making good hardware, runs Android tho. I love the KeyOne&Two, they are awesome business device.
- Phillipharryt 7y ago
  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.

HillRat 7y ago

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.

millstone 7y ago
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.
- irq 7y ago
  > 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.
  - bobsil1 7y ago
    Yup, it was going to be an embedded, first-party personal organizer.
  - 7y ago

megaremote 7y ago

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.

CPLX 7y ago

Sounds to me like the antitrust actions were effective. The world would not be a better place if MS had overwhelming mobile market share or had won the browser wars.

simonblack 7y ago

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.

hacker_9 7y ago
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.
- toyg 7y ago
  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...).
  - vezycash 7y ago
    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.

WalterBright 7y ago

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.

toyg 7y ago
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.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  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. :)

m0zg 7y ago

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.

apo 7y ago

> 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.

rossdavidh 7y ago
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.

JamesBarney 7y ago

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.

r00fus 7y ago
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.

im_down_w_otp 7y ago

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.

ryenus 7y ago

> In fact, Gates is still kicking himself for taking his eyes off the ball and allowing Google to develop Android And those in Google are probably also kicking themselves for taking their eyes off the ball and allowing Oracle to acquire Sun

zaphirplane 7y ago
Whatever for would google want sun. Java is open source, Solaris and sparc are struggling
- Phillipharryt 7y ago
  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.

RickJWagner 7y ago

Disappointed. I thought it was Clippy.

Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
And I thought it was his hubris in trying to fix American education without knowing really anything about it.
cultofmetatron 7y ago
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...

Ari_Ugwu 7y ago

All of this paved the way for Nadella. I count it as a net gain.

netwanderer3 7y ago

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.

Bakary 7y ago

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.

leesalminen 7y ago
I gave my twenties to the tech startup founder life. I won’t be giving my thirties to it.

jarjoura 7y ago

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.

jeremyjh 7y ago
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.
- aetherson 7y ago
  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

kerng 7y ago

Google didn't invent Android, they bought it. Maybe Microsoft's big mistake was to let that happen.

Izkata 7y ago
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. [0] https://www.androidauthority.com/history-android-os-name-789433/ https://www.androidauthority.com/history-android-os-name-789...
- Phillipharryt 7y ago
  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.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    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.
    - Phillipharryt 7y ago
      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)

zmmmmm 7y ago

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.

la_barba 7y ago
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.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  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.
  - la_barba 7y ago
    >In a perfect world, with nice roadmaps and planning and easy negotiations, yes Microsoft will develop hooks for you. I don't why you think this is some pie in the sky fantasy. What I said is _already_ happening. This is normal stuff. For e.g. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ Or specifically - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/windows-embedded-ce-licensing-program.aspx https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/windows-embedde...

rramadass 7y ago

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.

scarface74 7y ago
And you have compromises. Windows sucks as a tablet OS.

espeed 7y ago

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 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-America [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again#Social_media_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again#Socia...

Phillipharryt 7y ago
Though funnily two of those 4 are founded by foreigners, both sons of immigrants (and Sergey is himself one).

gesman 7y ago

Biggest mistake was to let Ballmer to stall Microsoft progress, creativity and business for a decade. Say it, Bill

fuzzfactor 7y ago
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.

kazinator 7y ago

> 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.

snarky-ftfy 7y ago

Letting Steve Ballmer take control of the company. FTFY

topkai22 7y ago

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.

polyomino 7y ago
It wasn't free they got paid. Google shared mobile search revenue with manufacturers.

joshanderson 7y ago

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.

MrQuincle 7y ago

Actually I expected this to be about his current activities. What would be his largest mistake with respect to effective altruism? A mistake there is about the life or death of thousands of people. Maybe more.

Spearchucker 7y ago

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.

tellme_throwa 7y ago

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. And BillG didn't deserve it...

thelazydogsback 7y ago

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.)