8 ms·

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 clie

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.
  - wahnfrieden 7y ago
    How do we know this was their actual strategic internal decision vs a practical one because an SDK for third party applications wasn’t ready yet or not important at launch?
    - irq 7y ago
      Because of the WWDC events in which they touted their web-based API at the time as being all one needed to compete with Apple's own native apps. That turned out to be completely untrue and they backtracked.
      - richardwhiuk 7y ago
        I'm not convinced they believed that at the time.
      - wahnfrieden 7y ago
        That would have still been the right thing for them to say publicly if they did intend to release an SDK later though. Since it’s been a long time now, I’ve wondered if anyone’s spoken to their internal positioning.
    - jnaina 7y ago
      Steve Jobs was very careful about the “Osborne effect”. Even if they had plans for an App SDK as part of the future iPhone roadmap, he would have never divulged it, to prevent customers from deffering purchases
  - empath75 7y ago
    Imagine if they had announced apps were coming for the iPhone, and potential customers waited for apps to come out and app developers waited for people to buy the phone. Apple basically needed a take it or leave it strategy for the first release.
  - nathanvanfleet 7y ago
    Still props to them that they saw it would be a benefit to the platform to allow it, and did so pretty quickly.
  - kijiki 7y ago
    I have this conspiracy theory that I half believe: it was all a ruse. Apple knew that there would be huge pushback against a walled garden appstore with Apple in absolute control, and huge pushback on them taking a 30% cut. So they started with "just write web apps". But of course, they also inexplicably made the first iPhone 2G only! Flagship phones that shipped many months before the iPhone had 3G. Why cut that particular corner, and not any others in their otherwise $$$-is-no-object new wonderphone? You can do a much better job hiding low bandwidth and high latency in a native app, especially since app assets get downloaded once (probably over wifi) at app install time. So by essentially making app developers beg for access to their native platform, they radically reduced the anger at their wildly locked-down appstore and their 30% cut. And it seemed a little suspicious how quickly they were able to deliver a 3rd-party SDK and developer documentation.
    - joachimma 7y ago
      Wasn't Palm taking a 80% cut in their glory days? (My google skills fail me) I heard developers saying that 30% was a great deal at the time.
      - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        I think it was Handango that set the 30% expectation. They were the first with such a high cut I think, and was among the first app sites for most of the PDAs of the time. 30% was pretty offensive after years of shareware.
        Theodores 7y ago
        But then apps cost pennies compared to the software we were used to. Office cost many hundreds of dollars and I regularly paid £400+ for PC programs that did just one thing. £350 for Photoshop was a steal. But then apps came along costing a small handful of dollars. They also did things you could not do on your PC due to the connectivity, the camera and the sensors. Everything changed when it came to price expectations.
      - irq 7y ago
  - setr 7y ago
    Wasn’t the original idea that apps weren’t required, as html5 would be sufficient? Jobs initialy believed in webapps. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything about no kinds of third party applications on ios at all
    - distances 7y ago
      Almost every platform seems to have believed in web apps at some point. Nokia did an attempt with Symbian, Palm had WebOS, Samsung tried that with Tizen, Apple with iPhones, Microsoft for Windows 8, Mozilla's Firefox OS... I'm sure I forgot a few. All attempts failed quite completely.
      - johnnycab 7y ago
        >I'm sure I forgot a few. All attempts failed quite completely. You forgot BlackBerry, who failed themselves spectacularly by becoming a patent troll. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190228/17170141697/blackberry-continues-shameful-descent-into-patent-trolling-suing-twitter.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190228/17170141697/black...
- Iv 7y ago
  It also took MS forever to have an ARM version of Windows...
  - mkl 7y ago
    Depends on your definition of "Windows": Windows CE ran on ARM in the 1990s.
    - inflatableDodo 7y ago
      WinCE was really their most accurately named OS to date.
      - aliswe 7y ago
        Ive seen this remark before. What does it mean?
        TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
        "wince"
        aliswe 7y ago
        Oh
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      Nowadays "Windows" usually refers to "Windows NT"; not Windows 9x or Windows CE. Windows NT was highly portable. It ran on PowerPC, Alpha, Itanium, and a whole lot of other architectures. The same is true for iOS.
      - raverbashing 7y ago
        True Then they dragged their feet and kept Windows 2000 x86 only (I think - maybe they had an Itanium version) they had a half-ready x64 version of Windows XP
monkeydreams 7y ago
> Nothing breeds failure quite like success even, evidently, in hindsight. Great empires are never brought down by their failings, it is their successes which do them in.
jessewmc 7y ago
They almost made the same mistake with XBox, but Allard, Fries & company managed to convince Gates not to brand things as Windows.
- bobsil1 7y ago
  Windows Everywhere was a bad slogan, bred tunnel vision.
  - CamperBob2 7y ago
    It's just incredible that MS has never understood how toxic the Windows brand is -- or, if not 'toxic', at least worthless. The only time the term Windows ever enters an ordinary user's vocabulary is when they call tech support to complain about something going wrong with their computer. (Or when a scammer calls them.) It would be one thing if it were a branding mistake made by one CEO or one management team at one isolated point in time. But they have tried to turn Windows into a viable, positive consumer brand for longer than many of their customers have been alive. Time to run up the white flag on this one, guys. It's not going to happen.
    - orf 7y ago
      So your saying that to a layman Windows is ubiquitous to a computer, and that somehow makes the brand worthless? When you are talking about a Hoover, sure. Anyone can make a hoover, and the name looses all meaning and becomes a victim of its own success. That’s happening to Docker right now. But Windows is different. Not anyone can make “a Windows”, because the difference between a computer and Windows is a lot more noticeable than the difference between one type of vacuum cleaner and another. The link between Windows and a computer does make it harder to turn into some form of platform, sure, but it’s far, far, far from worthless.
      - Izkata 7y ago
        You got the association off: It's not brand -> generic, it's "user has a problem" -> brand. For non-techie people (most users), it was always "my computer" or "my PC" until they had a problem with it and had to think about "Windows". So yeah, as GP said, "Windows" did already have a negative reputation and was viewed as a necessary evil. Particularly when the iPhone was released, Windows Vista had just come out a few months before.
thomasmarriott 7y ago
Ironic: "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose." —Gates, 1995 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#The_Road_Ahead_(1995) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#The_Road_Ahead_(199...
- squarefoot 7y ago
  Even more ironic is that he had to revise that book just after its publication because in the 1st edition he totally missed what phenomenon the Internet was going to become.
  - TomMarius 7y ago
    Did he? I thought this is the book about the "information highway"?
    - ngcc_hk 7y ago
      Yes he missed it. To be fair I am not sure Steve got that either. Network and internet is very hard to grasp as a business platform at those time.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      He completely failed to understand, or even mention, the internet as it was then developing. Before we got shanghaied by adtech, and "social". His small vision of the information highway was a world full of Encarta CDs and Micrsoft Windows services that you'd subscribe to. The main memory of the book though is "oh boy, what a boring read". Some achievement at a time when computing was firmly in its most exciting period, before it became a commodity.
      - TomMarius 7y ago
        Thank you. I was too young to read and experience it at the time so I don't really know.
Lendal 7y ago
I think most companies do this, even ones that aren't that successful. If you've got a product that has any modicum of success at any point, the natural inclination is to push and mold that product into every corner of every space you're in. Any employee that spends time on anything else is not pulling their weight in the company.
Abishek_Muthian 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.” Not without Satya Nadella's Microsoft, who knows how to exploit open-source ecosystem. Even if Steve Ballmer had bought Android instead of Google, Microsoft would have sold it to manufacturers at premium without letting them to innovate upon it(Like they did with Windows Mobile/Phone OS). So android under Pre-Nadella would have failed anyways. So Bill Gates, take it easy; android under Microsoft wouldn't have become a reality due to the seeds you sowed in the Microsoft's Philosophy. But things are changing thanks to extraordinary overhaul of Satya Nadella.
- Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
  Further Microsoft killed Nokia's MeeGo OS in favor of Windows Phone OS, MeeGo was far capable than Android was at that time. Now telling that 'We should have done Android' sounds like convenient amnesia to put it lightly.
  - tjoff 7y ago
    Yes, that was a real shame - I have wanted something like MeeGo ever since. But MeeGo wasn't a mainstream OS.
    - Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
      I would like to think, MeeGo survived in an alternate universe with Microsoft forming the 'Open handset alliance' instead of Google; but then that could mean intel taking a monopoly in smartphone chipset considering it was co-developer of MeeGo instead of ARM. I like to have ARM where it is now, just for the sake of democratising computation. Full fledged linux on smartphones is taking shape in the form of SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch (UBPorts), postmarketOS etc. They could scale up with manufacturers like Pine releasing devices such as PinePhone. Meanwhile, Google is moving away from Linux for their mobile devices with Fuchsia.
Causality1 7y ago
It's been barely any time at all since they gave up pushing that "We're calling our x86-64 OS and our ARM laptop/tablet OS and our ARM phone OS the same thing because they're the same system" horseshit. It may look like Windows 10 but none of the drivers work, half the x86 programs don't run, and the ones that do run make you feel like you're using a Transmeta CPU from 2002.
MarkMc 7y ago
Microsoft's previous success didn't just cripple their smartphone OS development - it also damaged their sales. Handset manufacturers like Samsung could see the exorbitant 'Windows tax' that ate into the profit margin of every desktop PC, so they would have preferred open-source Android to closed-source Windows Mobile even if both were free. It turned out that Android could lock in the manufacturers with Google Play services built on top of an open-source platform - but this was not something that Microsoft executives considered at the time.
- scarface74 7y ago
  There is no Windows Tax for all practical purposes. The crapware that OEMs put on Windows PCs more than made up for the Windows license fee. Windows OEMs actually lose money selling consumer Linux computers since they don’t get the kickbacks from bundled software. Besides that, if every company is paying the same amount for a Windows license, they all add it into the price of selling a PC.
  - MarkMc 7y ago
    Crapware is orthogonal to the Windows licence - if Linux had become popular with the general public then OEMs would have been just as happy to bundle crapware with their Linux boxes. You're right that all OEMs pass the Windows licencing fee onto consumers, but consumers then respond by buying fewer computers, so it's still a hit to OEM profit.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      The estimated $30 per computer that OEMs pay has nothing to do with consumers buying fewer PCs. Consumers are buying fewer PCs because of mobile and better single use devices like streaming boxes, smart TVs, and consoles. Who was going to pay for crapware on Linux? Few PC consumers want computers without Windows just like few consumers want Android without Google Services. Besides that, computers have been “good enough” for home use for awhile where they don’t need to be upgraded. Considering that most non gamers only use their home computers for Web+Office these days. I just brought home an old Dell Inspiron Dual Core Pentium circa 2009 running Windows 7 (cleaned it up) with 4Gb of RAM and installed the latest version of Chrome and Office using one of my 6 available users. The only thing slow about is the spinning hard drive for what she needed. In fact, Dell still sells low end laptops with lower resolution than my 10 year old Dell (1600x900), the same 4GB RAM, the same speed hard drive, and the same wireless technology - 802.11n 5Ghz. While neither the built in Ethernet or WiFi can take advantage of my gig-e up/down. It’s still not a bottleneck for their crappy cable internet.
sumedh 7y ago
> What I find interesting is that he still doesn’t realize that because Microsoft was dominant in specific plays I think he knows that since he said in one interview back in the 90s that he is worried about 2 guys working in a garage coming up with a product that would disrupt MS.
anonu 7y ago
Great point. Also let's not forget Microsoft messed up the browser game too. Internet explorer was a colossal catch up game to Netscape... And they were off by a few years here and never able to catch up. I'm also surprised Gates is so hard on himself about Android.

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.
- wahnfrieden 7y ago
  How do we know this was their actual strategic internal decision vs a practical one because an SDK for third party applications wasn’t ready yet or not important at launch?
  - irq 7y ago
    Because of the WWDC events in which they touted their web-based API at the time as being all one needed to compete with Apple's own native apps. That turned out to be completely untrue and they backtracked.
    - richardwhiuk 7y ago
      I'm not convinced they believed that at the time.
    - wahnfrieden 7y ago
      That would have still been the right thing for them to say publicly if they did intend to release an SDK later though. Since it’s been a long time now, I’ve wondered if anyone’s spoken to their internal positioning.
  - jnaina 7y ago
    Steve Jobs was very careful about the “Osborne effect”. Even if they had plans for an App SDK as part of the future iPhone roadmap, he would have never divulged it, to prevent customers from deffering purchases
- empath75 7y ago
  Imagine if they had announced apps were coming for the iPhone, and potential customers waited for apps to come out and app developers waited for people to buy the phone. Apple basically needed a take it or leave it strategy for the first release.
- nathanvanfleet 7y ago
  Still props to them that they saw it would be a benefit to the platform to allow it, and did so pretty quickly.
- kijiki 7y ago
  I have this conspiracy theory that I half believe: it was all a ruse. Apple knew that there would be huge pushback against a walled garden appstore with Apple in absolute control, and huge pushback on them taking a 30% cut. So they started with "just write web apps". But of course, they also inexplicably made the first iPhone 2G only! Flagship phones that shipped many months before the iPhone had 3G. Why cut that particular corner, and not any others in their otherwise $$$-is-no-object new wonderphone? You can do a much better job hiding low bandwidth and high latency in a native app, especially since app assets get downloaded once (probably over wifi) at app install time. So by essentially making app developers beg for access to their native platform, they radically reduced the anger at their wildly locked-down appstore and their 30% cut. And it seemed a little suspicious how quickly they were able to deliver a 3rd-party SDK and developer documentation.
  - joachimma 7y ago
    Wasn't Palm taking a 80% cut in their glory days? (My google skills fail me) I heard developers saying that 30% was a great deal at the time.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      I think it was Handango that set the 30% expectation. They were the first with such a high cut I think, and was among the first app sites for most of the PDAs of the time. 30% was pretty offensive after years of shareware.
      - Theodores 7y ago
        But then apps cost pennies compared to the software we were used to. Office cost many hundreds of dollars and I regularly paid £400+ for PC programs that did just one thing. £350 for Photoshop was a steal. But then apps came along costing a small handful of dollars. They also did things you could not do on your PC due to the connectivity, the camera and the sensors. Everything changed when it came to price expectations.
    - irq 7y ago
- setr 7y ago
  Wasn’t the original idea that apps weren’t required, as html5 would be sufficient? Jobs initialy believed in webapps. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything about no kinds of third party applications on ios at all
  - distances 7y ago
    Almost every platform seems to have believed in web apps at some point. Nokia did an attempt with Symbian, Palm had WebOS, Samsung tried that with Tizen, Apple with iPhones, Microsoft for Windows 8, Mozilla's Firefox OS... I'm sure I forgot a few. All attempts failed quite completely.
    - johnnycab 7y ago
      >I'm sure I forgot a few. All attempts failed quite completely. You forgot BlackBerry, who failed themselves spectacularly by becoming a patent troll. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190228/17170141697/blackberry-continues-shameful-descent-into-patent-trolling-suing-twitter.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190228/17170141697/black...
Iv 7y ago
It also took MS forever to have an ARM version of Windows...
- mkl 7y ago
  Depends on your definition of "Windows": Windows CE ran on ARM in the 1990s.
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    WinCE was really their most accurately named OS to date.
    - aliswe 7y ago
      Ive seen this remark before. What does it mean?
      - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
        "wince"
        aliswe 7y ago
        Oh
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    Nowadays "Windows" usually refers to "Windows NT"; not Windows 9x or Windows CE. Windows NT was highly portable. It ran on PowerPC, Alpha, Itanium, and a whole lot of other architectures. The same is true for iOS.
    - raverbashing 7y ago
      True Then they dragged their feet and kept Windows 2000 x86 only (I think - maybe they had an Itanium version) they had a half-ready x64 version of Windows XP

monkeydreams 7y ago

> Nothing breeds failure quite like success even, evidently, in hindsight. Great empires are never brought down by their failings, it is their successes which do them in.

jessewmc 7y ago

They almost made the same mistake with XBox, but Allard, Fries & company managed to convince Gates not to brand things as Windows.

bobsil1 7y ago
Windows Everywhere was a bad slogan, bred tunnel vision.
- CamperBob2 7y ago
  It's just incredible that MS has never understood how toxic the Windows brand is -- or, if not 'toxic', at least worthless. The only time the term Windows ever enters an ordinary user's vocabulary is when they call tech support to complain about something going wrong with their computer. (Or when a scammer calls them.) It would be one thing if it were a branding mistake made by one CEO or one management team at one isolated point in time. But they have tried to turn Windows into a viable, positive consumer brand for longer than many of their customers have been alive. Time to run up the white flag on this one, guys. It's not going to happen.
  - orf 7y ago
    So your saying that to a layman Windows is ubiquitous to a computer, and that somehow makes the brand worthless? When you are talking about a Hoover, sure. Anyone can make a hoover, and the name looses all meaning and becomes a victim of its own success. That’s happening to Docker right now. But Windows is different. Not anyone can make “a Windows”, because the difference between a computer and Windows is a lot more noticeable than the difference between one type of vacuum cleaner and another. The link between Windows and a computer does make it harder to turn into some form of platform, sure, but it’s far, far, far from worthless.
    - Izkata 7y ago
      You got the association off: It's not brand -> generic, it's "user has a problem" -> brand. For non-techie people (most users), it was always "my computer" or "my PC" until they had a problem with it and had to think about "Windows". So yeah, as GP said, "Windows" did already have a negative reputation and was viewed as a necessary evil. Particularly when the iPhone was released, Windows Vista had just come out a few months before.

thomasmarriott 7y ago

Ironic: "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose." —Gates, 1995 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#The_Road_Ahead_(1995) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#The_Road_Ahead_(199...

squarefoot 7y ago
Even more ironic is that he had to revise that book just after its publication because in the 1st edition he totally missed what phenomenon the Internet was going to become.
- TomMarius 7y ago
  Did he? I thought this is the book about the "information highway"?
  - ngcc_hk 7y ago
    Yes he missed it. To be fair I am not sure Steve got that either. Network and internet is very hard to grasp as a business platform at those time.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    He completely failed to understand, or even mention, the internet as it was then developing. Before we got shanghaied by adtech, and "social". His small vision of the information highway was a world full of Encarta CDs and Micrsoft Windows services that you'd subscribe to. The main memory of the book though is "oh boy, what a boring read". Some achievement at a time when computing was firmly in its most exciting period, before it became a commodity.
    - TomMarius 7y ago
      Thank you. I was too young to read and experience it at the time so I don't really know.

Lendal 7y ago

I think most companies do this, even ones that aren't that successful. If you've got a product that has any modicum of success at any point, the natural inclination is to push and mold that product into every corner of every space you're in. Any employee that spends time on anything else is not pulling their weight in the company.

Abishek_Muthian 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.” Not without Satya Nadella's Microsoft, who knows how to exploit open-source ecosystem. Even if Steve Ballmer had bought Android instead of Google, Microsoft would have sold it to manufacturers at premium without letting them to innovate upon it(Like they did with Windows Mobile/Phone OS). So android under Pre-Nadella would have failed anyways. So Bill Gates, take it easy; android under Microsoft wouldn't have become a reality due to the seeds you sowed in the Microsoft's Philosophy. But things are changing thanks to extraordinary overhaul of Satya Nadella.

Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
Further Microsoft killed Nokia's MeeGo OS in favor of Windows Phone OS, MeeGo was far capable than Android was at that time. Now telling that 'We should have done Android' sounds like convenient amnesia to put it lightly.
- tjoff 7y ago
  Yes, that was a real shame - I have wanted something like MeeGo ever since. But MeeGo wasn't a mainstream OS.
  - Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
    I would like to think, MeeGo survived in an alternate universe with Microsoft forming the 'Open handset alliance' instead of Google; but then that could mean intel taking a monopoly in smartphone chipset considering it was co-developer of MeeGo instead of ARM. I like to have ARM where it is now, just for the sake of democratising computation. Full fledged linux on smartphones is taking shape in the form of SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch (UBPorts), postmarketOS etc. They could scale up with manufacturers like Pine releasing devices such as PinePhone. Meanwhile, Google is moving away from Linux for their mobile devices with Fuchsia.

Causality1 7y ago

It's been barely any time at all since they gave up pushing that "We're calling our x86-64 OS and our ARM laptop/tablet OS and our ARM phone OS the same thing because they're the same system" horseshit. It may look like Windows 10 but none of the drivers work, half the x86 programs don't run, and the ones that do run make you feel like you're using a Transmeta CPU from 2002.

MarkMc 7y ago

Microsoft's previous success didn't just cripple their smartphone OS development - it also damaged their sales. Handset manufacturers like Samsung could see the exorbitant 'Windows tax' that ate into the profit margin of every desktop PC, so they would have preferred open-source Android to closed-source Windows Mobile even if both were free. It turned out that Android could lock in the manufacturers with Google Play services built on top of an open-source platform - but this was not something that Microsoft executives considered at the time.

scarface74 7y ago
There is no Windows Tax for all practical purposes. The crapware that OEMs put on Windows PCs more than made up for the Windows license fee. Windows OEMs actually lose money selling consumer Linux computers since they don’t get the kickbacks from bundled software. Besides that, if every company is paying the same amount for a Windows license, they all add it into the price of selling a PC.
- MarkMc 7y ago
  Crapware is orthogonal to the Windows licence - if Linux had become popular with the general public then OEMs would have been just as happy to bundle crapware with their Linux boxes. You're right that all OEMs pass the Windows licencing fee onto consumers, but consumers then respond by buying fewer computers, so it's still a hit to OEM profit.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    The estimated $30 per computer that OEMs pay has nothing to do with consumers buying fewer PCs. Consumers are buying fewer PCs because of mobile and better single use devices like streaming boxes, smart TVs, and consoles. Who was going to pay for crapware on Linux? Few PC consumers want computers without Windows just like few consumers want Android without Google Services. Besides that, computers have been “good enough” for home use for awhile where they don’t need to be upgraded. Considering that most non gamers only use their home computers for Web+Office these days. I just brought home an old Dell Inspiron Dual Core Pentium circa 2009 running Windows 7 (cleaned it up) with 4Gb of RAM and installed the latest version of Chrome and Office using one of my 6 available users. The only thing slow about is the spinning hard drive for what she needed. In fact, Dell still sells low end laptops with lower resolution than my 10 year old Dell (1600x900), the same 4GB RAM, the same speed hard drive, and the same wireless technology - 802.11n 5Ghz. While neither the built in Ethernet or WiFi can take advantage of my gig-e up/down. It’s still not a bottleneck for their crappy cable internet.

sumedh 7y ago

> What I find interesting is that he still doesn’t realize that because Microsoft was dominant in specific plays I think he knows that since he said in one interview back in the 90s that he is worried about 2 guys working in a garage coming up with a product that would disrupt MS.

anonu 7y ago

Great point. Also let's not forget Microsoft messed up the browser game too. Internet explorer was a colossal catch up game to Netscape... And they were off by a few years here and never able to catch up. I'm also surprised Gates is so hard on himself about Android.