In an interview with Village Global, Bill Gates said: “In the software world, particularly for platforms, these are winner-take-all markets, so the greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is. Android is the standard non-Apple phone platform. There’s room for exactly one non-Apple operating system.”
In another interview with Economic Club in Washington, DC, Bill Gates spoke about how the company failed in assigning “the best” staff to work on mobile.
“We knew the mobile phone would be very popular so we were doing what was called Windows Mobile. We missed being the dominant mobile operating system by a very tiny amount,” CNN quoted Gates as saying at the event.
“We were distracted during our antitrust trial. We didn’t assign the best people to do the work. So it’s the biggest mistake I made in terms of something that was clearly within our skill set. We were clearly the company that should have achieved that — and we didn’t.”
Microsoft launched its own mobile operating system named – Windows Mobile – in 2000 while Apple launched theirs, named iPhone in 2007, and Google came with Android in 2008.