Bill Gates, in an interview for some venture capital firm’s event:
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.
It really is winner take all. If you’re there with half as many apps or 90% as many apps, you’re on your way to complete doom. There’s room for exactly one non-Apple operating system, and what’s that worth? $400 billion that would be transferred from company G [Google] to company M [Microsoft].
It really sucks that consumer technology platforms always seem to settle on only two platforms, with everything else relegated to the sidelines. Windows Phone, Sailfish, webOS, and others all had great ideas that just don’t get a fair chance in the market, and from both a consumer’s and an enthusiast’s perspective, that is such a shame.
Thom Holwerda,
I agree, and this is just one instance of a much broader problem with capitalism. It is sold to us with a vision of many many companies providing products & services and consumers choosing from the best. However healthy capitalism requires robust competition. And when so few of the most powerful players can sabotage all competition and consolidate nearly the entire market around themselves, that’s unhealthy capitalism. Too few have all the resources. It’s not something that the market can self-correct while leaving the winners in power since they’ll always have the advantages to win over and over again without competing fairly. We should have avoided this scenario we find ourselves in, but of course governments haven’t done enough to promote healthy competition and so we’ve lost it. Agencies such as the FTC have been so heavily corrupted that they are headed by industry leaders who were nominated with the understanding that they would work for the monopolies they oversee. It’s insane. When this happens, the consumer looses.
Copyright laws grant a monopoly to the creator of intangible assets for way too long a period. That is why you get this winner takes it all situation and the race for locking in customers. Any usage rights to intellectual property should expire after five years at the latest. Nobody invests unless the business case is profitable in this period of time any way. But of course industry lobbying – or better: bribing – has been working in the other direction.
“However healthy capitalism requires robust competition. And when so few of the most powerful players can sabotage all competition and consolidate nearly the entire market around themselves, that’s unhealthy capitalism.”
Capitalism is about the profit motive and doing anything or everything to accomplish that objective. It isn’t about creating a just and equitable world. Just as there is no such thing as a honest successful business.
Competitive businesses will actively work against regulation and any instrument that is designed to limit their profits. No one will allow their profits to reach a plateu, the business machinery will continue to gobble up everything in its path to fuel an endless growth. Failing to do so leaves them vulnerable to be gobbled up. A model fueled by greed can never be altruistic. This is just the true nature of the beast.
Prior to smartphones, the mobile market was really healthy. I could go out and get a Nokia, a BlackBerry, a Windows CE or multiple other phones with different OS. It was hardware innovation that drove the market (just look at the Nokia form factors of yesteryear).
What apple caused and android capitalised on was the “million apps in the app store” narrative. Android did this by making it incredibly easy to submit a fart app. Small players couldn’t then compete against the narrative and perception became reality. Mobile phones hardware innovation has basically died and all phones are a rectangle of glass.
All they needed was probably to keep compatibility with former Windows CE applications, set up an app store, keep apps side-loadable, give the OS for free and keep improving it.
Android would probably not have made it, all the best apps were available already on Windows Mobile.
Microsoft had plenty of time to develop a mobile operating system. They started their mobile efforts years before Apple started work on the iPhone and what was to become iOS, and years before Google started work on Android (which was first started as a project to protect Google from a possible Microsoft mobile OS monopoly and but which pivoted it’s entire design direction once the iPhone was announced).
All Microsoft’s mobile work was either shoddy and third rate (because it didn’t think it would have any real competitors because it could exploit it’s existing Windows monopoly and so was lazy and lackadaisical about end user experience – it’s default corporate culture) or in it’s final incarnation just lacking in any real USP to convince people to switch from iOS or Android.
Is there any real call for yet another mobile operating system, what possible consumer need would it meet that is not met by the existing platforms?
What’s with this historical revisionism?
It is no one’s fault but Microsoft’s that they failed to gain a foothold in the market. They were in the optimal position, at just the right time, to have become the next Blackberry and become the big name in enterprise mobile devices, which would have trickled down to the consumer market. They had everything they needed: the Windows brand, the engineering talent, the enterprise stack, the developers. Instead, they repeatedly alienated their developers *and* their users both, by not only breaking API compatibility between every major version of Windows Phone, but by requiring a new device in order to upgrade to a new version of the os. I’ll be kind and not go deep into the fiasco which was Windows RT. They have no one to blame but themselves for their repeated mistakes. I suppose that Bill Gates, at least, can feel some comfort that he only contributed indirectly to the problem, but still…
As for the other examples sited… well, need I remind anyone here how Jolla treated their “customers”, using the term loosely? People who crowdfunded the so-called Jolla tablet in good faith, only to receive half a refund at best if they weren’t one of the “lucky” ones who got the product? Need I remind anyone, also, about the poor hardware that was the only real way to run Firefox OS?
Honestly, who needs to blame the market when we have companies doing such a great job screwing themselves out of it?
+400b
The mistake was in letting the platform crash and burn as collateral damage to internal company politics.
Had nothing to do with “there’s only space for two in this market”.