Gates said that he has no “doubt the antitrust lawsuit was bad for Microsoft” as the company would have otherwise focused more on developing the mobile operating system. The lawsuit ended up distracting him away from Windows Mobile and he ultimately “screwed that up“.
He also said that Microsoft was “three months too late on a release” that would have been used by Motorola on a smartphone. While he did not provide the specifics, it is possible that Gates is referring to the iconic Motorola Droid which launched with Android and made consumers in the US notice the OS thanks to the heavy marketing push from Verizon and Motorola.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is actually quite close to reality. Had Verizon and an – at the time – influential phone makers like Motorola with its Droid phone and all the marketing blitz that accompanied it opted for a Microsoft product, I wouldn’t be so sure Android would’ve gotten the head start that it did.
No shit! The whole point of the anti-trust law suite was exactly to keep Microsoft from becoming an even bigger monopoly than it already was. What really should’ve happened, had the US prosecutors not been afraid, is for Microsoft to be broken up.
Gates’ comments just shows he and, most likely, Microsoft have not learned anything from the experience. This is why we (the consumers) need to always be vigilant!
Yes, we wouldn’t have nice friendly Microsoft we have today. We’d have evil as f*ck microsoft, controlling everything and making terrible software.
I have to disagree. You have to remember how exceptionally _UNCOOL_ Microsoft was then. Google was still the darling of the internet world back then and I remember the excitement even of the original HTC Dream (aka T-Mobile G1). Microsoft hadn’t even released Windows 7 yet! Windows XP was still their main consumer desktop OS. It is really had to overstate how poorly received this would have been. Even if we’re talking about the Droid, which came out in 2009, this was just after the Windows 7 release. Microsoft would have been totally incapable of making anything that consumers would have rushed to embrace like the iPhone.
I mean if the Zune was a cellphone with a larger touch screen and dropped the scroll wheel or at least regulated it to a jog dial… it would have worked. But even then MS would have had to continue the fight against Palm… which probably would have head a big head start on it and might even have come out ahead of android without Apple soaking up too much of the market.
It is the nature of monopolies. Unregulated, microsoft was unstoppable. They basically write the rules and define the standards that everyone else has to follow. No one besides the government has the ability to put a limit on that kinds of abuse and all of microsoft’s competition today would be in a far weaker position if not for antitrust enforcement.
Of course many think antitrust does not go far enough, and many industries have become dominated by less than a handful of corporations.
Lax enforcement of antitrust laws is one problem. Deregulation and a permissive legislative environment skewing the field in favor of incumbents are other contributing problems.
“They basically write the rules and define the standards that everyone else has to follow.”
It was worse, it was undocumented (for the public, I’m certain they most have had some documentation internally ).
The EU forced them to do this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/protocols/ms-protocolslp/9a3ae8a2-02e5-4d05-874a-b3551405d8f9
What a load of cobblers.
Nobody has ever liked Microsoft’s mobile offerings, they’ve been the big loser in every single generation of handheld. It should also be noted that the way they’ve treated their flagship mobile partners has been appallingly bad. Remember what they did to Sendo? They’re inflexible, lying, cheating scumbags who poured tons of money in to handheld markets year after year to try to buy their way in with substandard offerings, but consumers weren’t having it.
Jeeves,
That’s kind of the point, monopolies often get their power by abusing the market, lying, cheating, corrupting standards, unfair contracts, punishing vendors, etc. It was so bad that for decades we the consumers had to pay the microsoft tax whether we were running windows or not. I have absolutely no doubt that these same reprehensible strategies would have monopolized mobile in an alternate timeline had there been no microsoft antitrust lawsuits.
I disagree. MS was way out ahead of everyone with Windows Mobile at the time.
Windows Mobile was really popular in the early 2000s. It wasn’t as popular as feature phones, but it had some momentum. The ROM scene really took off with Android, but the before Android they were using Windows Mobile. At the time, ~2006, it was very plausible MS could have released a Windows Mobile version which would have relegated Android to either a very niche market or caused Google to scuttle it all together. All they needed was an OS with a decent web browser, and it just so happens, MS did not do that until way too late.
The iPhone was on a whole other level, so it would have been as revolutionary as it was no matter the circumstances. It looks obvious now, but it was a quantum leap in technology. It was always going to be Apple plus a second party.
Flatland_Spider,
I always found it odd that the original vision for the iphone was a browser device that didn’t support installable apps. The cydia app store came out for jailbroken iphones and spread rapidly among iphone users. That’s when apple decided that v2 would need to add an apple app store, which would become a much better business model for apple.
I also think it’s easy to forget one of the appeals of iphones back then was the “unlimited” data plan bundle at a time when that just didn’t exist for anyone else. ATT has said in hindsight that this deal was a mistake for the company, but people loved it. All other smart phones were generally locked into unaffordable multi-year plans with overages and quotas such that you had to monitor your usage like a halk. Downloading apps or too many web pages could put you over your monthly quota. That was a huge selling point available exclusively with the iphone. At least for me personally I could not afford any other smartphone due to the very high monthly bills of the bundled data plans. At least now BYOD plans unbundle the phone from the data plan so that you can chose both independently based on your needs, thank goodness for that.
It kept with the paradigm of the time. Most cellphones were fixed function appliances, and the idea of them being computing devices was pretty out there.
I’m sure ATT thinks lots of things are mistakes. Home Internet speeds faster then DSL, upgrading their equipment, women’s sufferage….
I’m trying to remember my ATT plan of that time, but I’m really drawing a blank about it. I do remember most things having really awful web browsers, so it didn’t matter how much data I had, the applications weren’t worth it. Opera Mini was a requirement for less painful web browsing in emergencies.
I think I had migrated to Blackberries at this time after trying Windows Mobile. They were great for email; that was about it though. It wasn’t until Android 2.x, or something, that I finally got a modern mobile OS, and Android was still super primitive compared to iOS at the time.
Flatland_Spider,
Most smartphones, including my nokia supported java apps (in the form of midp profile). Granted this was quite limited given the capacity, display, and numeric keypad as primary input, so it wasn’t particularly impressive and I’m not surprised that you don’t remember it. I did install a few games on my phone though. Apps were available both through the official carrier store as well as sideloading. The iphone had a much better browser than other phones at the time, but in terms of the programmable app paradigm it was actually a step backwards compared to average phones since the original iphone didn’t support user installable apps at all.
I only had a basic feature phone for a long time. Eventually I got an android because prices came way down and it did not cost any more than a feature phone. I still miss the feature phones for making calls, I don’t really like these slabs of glass for phone calls. For me, they’re lousy for typing, which I do a lot of, but it is handy for emails and looking up stuff away from the computer.
For having worked with the first PocketPC 2002 from Compaq (remember them?) back in 2003 or 2004, I can testify they were quite usable but dang, nothing user friendly, you had to use a stylus on a tiny UI that so much tasted like a regular Windows 3.1 (Windows CE 4 or 5) yet with slight changes to habits (“Today”) that you really had to be a Microsoft nerd deep into your DNA to understand everything. And Toshiba had to tweak their ROM to make it work with their first 800×600 device because Windows CE was hard wired into 320×240 resolution. Microsoft was slow into innovation and hardware support because basically they had to do it all by themselves since no source code was available. There was no app market either, you installed cab files that could easily embed a malicious payload. They really struggled into adding security into their products, remember early versions of XP ? They were just not into the position to assume it. Period. As much cash you own.
Seconded. Windows mobile in the early 2000’s were great to write code for, but the user experience was evil. Absolutely evil. The devices themselves were ok, but primitive batteries did not deal well with being uncharged. We had to keep them with charge or they would just go into some kind of mummified state that would take a week, not kidding, a whole week of being charged. During this charging there was no indication that the device was alive. Some sales guy was fired at my office for leaving 10 of them in this state in his desk before a big sales demo with a fortune 500 company. I mean there were other reasons, but this was definitely a factor.
Yeah, I do. I never had one, but I knew lots of people who did. They were cool for the time, but they really needed wireless networks to really fulfill their promise.
They were as user friendly as anything else from that time.
I always assumed they could have if they wanted to, but they didn’t want to and were incredibly oblivious. They owned the user facing embedded market with Windows Mobile. It was good enough, and they got complacent. They were still an incredibly arrogant company around this time.
I’m guessing they assumed their brand name was worth more then it was. They believed they could release whatever, and people would snap it up. They didn’t take Android and Google seriously.
Yeah, I do. It’s not like most people care about security. It’s just something that gets in their way. Android had a terrible security record until recently, and that didn’t stop people from making it the dominant mobile OS.
People care about price, and that’s it. They want free/cheap stuff, and they don’t really care about the consequences.
They could have gone after Android harder then what they did. They didn’t really push their patents as much as they could have. The anti-trust investigation probably had something to do with this, and I can see MS going scorched earth to block Android if they didn’t have to play nice.
No windows ce products were not as user friendly as everything else. Palm was much easier to use. Normal business people used Palm. Crazy people used windows ce, that might have had one ro two line of business apps that were possible only on the pocket pc.
How would Gates have had a dongle mouse to use on the phone screen, or would he had used a trackball?
He might be right, but the phone would be needed to be rebooted mid-day and in the morning, have an awful and inconsistent UI, run “office”. Have a crappy browser (and give competitors a “jarring experience”) since it would use x86 activeX components.
The problem is by the time of the AntiTrust suit, Microsoft had become IBM, leveraging its existing monopolies to create others and crush competition that way instead of innovating.
windows CE was awful, and it was a response to Palm and embedded. No embedded system I know of used this crapware (the interrupt jitter was horrible as an example).
Also see “communites dominate brands” about how Elop destroyed Nokia, its competitive OVI app store, and the Maemo operating system by crushing them and shoving the crappy Windows stuff down their throat.
If Windows Mobile was viable, Nokia would still be a thing. Instead, like the Kin, it managed to destroy the host since Microsoft couldn’t or wouldn’t use monopolistic force.
This thought of Windows Mobile becoming the second OS seemed cute for a while, then gave me shivers. Imagine the same not-fully-removable apps you install on desktop Windows (ImgBurn is a good example, as the latest version installs a ton of unremovable crapware not removed by the uninstaller) BUT ON YOUR PHONE.
At least on Android, if I don’t like an app, I can remove it without any executable files left behind. Because apps are not given system-wide access, but are simply allocated a folder.
kurkosdr,
I agree, windows and other operating systems too created bad habits for application developers. Sandboxing helps a lot. In my linux distro I tried to apply good sandboxing principals (isolating apps to their own directories as you say), but I failed because everything I tried to install was hardcode to step everywhere. Of course I could fix the applications myself to adhere to the sandbox model, but amount of effort required quickly made it clear this was a no-go for a small project like mine. Consequently I fell back to a more traditional linux scheme to be compatible, but I’m still not thrilled with that.
Android had the benefit of sandboxing from the start. It’s great as long as the owner stays in control.
However I’m extremely pissed that google has been imposing certain policies by force without giving owners a way to override them. For example, In android 8 and earlier wifi polling worked great. While you wouldn’t want apps wifi polling all the time, it is an absolutely essential tool for diagnosing network issues. Yet in android 9 google decided to throttle wifi polling to 4 intervals per 2 minutes across all applications. Google responded saying this was deliberate and they would not give owners a way to override this policy, WTF google, you’re just making android worse! Apparently they finally added a “developer” option in android 10. It ought be a user option, but whatever. Unfortunately it doesn’t do me any good because 10 isn’t available for my phone; not having a good network scanner has been extremely problematic with android 9.
https://github.com/VREMSoftwareDevelopment/WiFiAnalyzer/issues/199
Long story short: application jails are good, owner jails are horrible. I find the later unforgivable.
On the other hand, users can be easily bullied by app developers into granting elevated access to apps or into granting access to battery-life-compromising settings (like WiFi), even for apps that don’t need it for their core function. The app can just keep asking for the relevant permission and refuse to function until it gets it. The “no soup for you” trick is a powerful convincer.
I believe Android does a fine job (compromise) by hiding the battery-life-compromising stuff under “developer options” and by reserving the security-compromising stuff (like root access) for community-baked ROMs.
Buy an Android phone with an unlocked bootloader and you are not jailed.
kurkosdr,
Except that it’s a horrible “compromise” because it breaks functionality with no recourse or giving the owner any say. A far better solution is simply to “out” the applications that are guilty of consuming your battery/wifi. So long as you give owners that data, and leave the choice up to them, then there is no problem. Having vendors impose their policy on owners despite their wishes is unjustified. It’s none of their business what I want to do with my phone…that’s apple-think, and owner rights would be severely harmed if the google/apple duopoly were to both clamp down on on our ability to make our own decisions about what we run.
Ideally yes, but it’s not always that easy in practice. I had a hell of a time jailbreaking a google pixel since there’s an interlock between the bootloader and operating system to block firmware updates. This took me by surprise because on paper many 3rd party firmwares are supposed to support that phone, but it turns out there are different models of the phone with some models denying 3rd party firmwares. So before I could even flash a new recovery bootloader I had to flash another official image first, one that allowed custom flashing to be turned on in developer options.
It’s all the more confusing because “unlocked” in mobile terminology typically refers to an unlocked sim card, so while many phones are sold as “unlocked” (including mine), it doesn’t imply that it is rootable and as far as I can tell it’s hard to find rooted phones for sale from vendors.
Google can clearly do a better job, but alas it’s still better than apple anyways.
kurkosdr,
BTW I probably wasn’t clear in my response, but I was referring to the way google handled it in version 9, which screwed over users including me. If they had made wifi scanning an option in the first place, I wouldn’t even have brought this up.
I’m glad they at least caved to protest with version 10, but I’m not sure if/when that will be available on my device, because of google I’m currently at a loss for a wifi scanner that works on 9. And their original position is still extremely disappointing, I hope they exercise restraint in restricting android capabilities without owner consent in the future.
Are you counting all of the carrier mandated junk that comes with locked Android phones in this argument?
I’ve always found it best to use a third-party ROM on most Android phones or get a something unlocked upfront.
Flatland_Spider,
+1 for 3rd party ROMs and less preinstalled crap
Firstly, buy your own phone. Secondly, that crap can be disabled, so it’s not executable anymore.
In theory, yes. Unfortunately, on Android now you have OEM-provided Malware (look at things like Adups for an example of what that is). I’m not sure that’s an improvement. And don’t even get me started on what people sideload on their devices that won’t come out clean. Your shiny clean removal only works if you stick with Google Play. Of course it’s the same on iOS, and were iOS sideloading a thing, I’ve no doubt the same kind of difficult crap would get in there as well.
All that aside, Windows Mobile (not to be confused with Windows Phone) had the same problems as desktop Windows in that regard. Installed apps did not come out cleanly most of the time and yes, it had a registry with all the problems that come with such. It was actually much harder to clean Windows Mobile than desktop Windows, since you couldn’t get at parts of the system easily as a user even though app installers could. I do not have fond memories of Windows Mobile, not at all.
darknexus,
Sideloaded apps on android have the same sandbox whether they are installed from google’s app store or elsewhere. Google may (or may not) have better quality control than 3rd party sources for vetting the apps in the store, but once it’s on your device, it doesn’t really matter if it was installed from google or not. I can’t think of any scenario where a sideloaded app is more difficult to uninstall, but let me know if you can think of any.
Applications with root can obviously bypass the sandbox by design. But even so, apps in the google store can request root if you’ve rooted your phone and given them permission via supersu or similar. It’s not limited to sideloaded apps.
Yeah, the windows registry has always been a pain all around. The tools and implementation are so terrible that sometimes it can take less time to reinstall windows than track it down registry problems.
I never had experience with it, but I can see how that would be a problem.
“Rooting apps” are security exploits and and the vulnerabilities they rely on are patched as such. Which means no normal app that. Compare with Windows (Windows Mobile) where even popular commercial apps ask for root permission and get it (no soup for you otherwise). Then they proceed to mess with the registry, make other irreversible changes, and install unremovable executables.
BTW carrier and OEM junk apps in Android can be disabled, and I ‘d rather be careful what I buy than have to wonder whether every little app I install will do evil things to the OS.
Windows CE + mobile addition up to version 6 (with some versions called windows mobile entirely? 6 as I recall) were pretty nice.
And gave me what I still want now. An OS where I am the boss of it and can do what I want, install what I want.
I remember my final windows mobile phone and in it’s ending days trying out android on it just to see what it was like (as per most wm hardware it sucked compared to the pda’s and as such androis was unusable due to having to scale down, but still fun to play with). I spose anroid is the least pain these days (as least I have some choice). Though since noone makes phoen calls I guess a 4/5g modem either as a seperrate box or in a small win 10 box (example of hardware only, OS whatever you like!) would do fine also if android goes bad.
However he is wrong on what killed WM 7+…
Step 1. Release WM 7 specifing it is going to be dead in a year and apps are not compatible and lot’s of phones will not get the upgrade. Well that fosters a good community doesn’t it!
Step 2. Release WM 8/8.1 and tell everybody it’s a bit broken but WM 10 is coming soon and will fix that, for the phones that gety it. Well that’s sounds a good business plan.
Step 3. Release WM 10 when nobody cares and then pretty much say ther project is ending. Again, wow such finesse.
FWIW I still have a WM 10 phone I use most days. It is my work provided one. They are meant to be phasing them out by the end of the year for “security” reasons (like that aint a thing right now!), though I bet they will end up saying use your own device. Pretty much just use it for the application that is not anything to do with “skype” aka skype for business. (nee lync and whatever before that).
Bologna. He just needs a scapegoat, so he’s blaming the government. He missed the boat because he didn’t see it leaving. Own it Bill Gates – no one did this to you but you.
For evidence – it’s true the Droid marketing push probably accelerated Android’s adoption, but it was already underway – iPhone are expensive, and Android phones are not. This includes flagships – even though they launch expensive, they drop in price much much more rapidly than iPhone, to the point where you can actually get a deal – and consumers LOVE deals. Compare that with ANYTHING from Apple. The prices rarely come down enough, or if they do, they are a hobbled version of the better product (like shipping last year’s iPhone models with 8GB of storage…) AND, Metro UI has never proven itself viable in the marketplace on any other platform or form factor – quite the opposite really. Folks and developers alike just didn’t want it.
On top of that, there was a lot of Microsoft fatigue at that time. I don’t buy for a minute that anti-trust activity is the cause of their loss of that market.
The first Windows CE Think Client Desktop was released in 2002 https://www.cnet.com/news/first-ce-based-thin-client-ships/ for $700. A normal PC at the time cost closer to $2.5K https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/06/22/cost-of-a-computer-the-year-you-were-born/36156373/
I think Bill Gs biggest mistake was not making Windows CE the home market Computer Operating System and leaving Windows XX to the enterprise. Every college kid would have jumped at the opportunity to have a $700 PC. Instead Gates kind of did the opposite, other then the XBox, which was a genius move.
That was a thin client. It was cheap because it had garbage hardware, not because of the OS. Also it was 2002 – anything that couldn’t run every single DOS/Windows application ever made and wasn’t a Mac was dead on arrival for home users.
“Sideloaded apps on android have the same sandbox whether they are installed from google’s app store or elsewhere. Google may (or may not) have better quality control than 3rd party sources for vetting the apps in the store, but once it’s on your device, it doesn’t really matter if it was installed from google or not. I can’t think of any scenario where a sideloaded app is more difficult to uninstall, but let me know if you can think of any.”
There really aren’t any. and if there are apps like SD Maid do a pretty good job of hunting down and removing the linging remains of these installed apps
“darknexus
In theory, yes. Unfortunately, on Android now you have OEM-provided Malware (look at things like Adups for an example of what that is). I’m not sure that’s an improvement. And don’t even get me started on what people sideload on their devices that won’t come out clean. Your shiny clean removal only works if you stick with Google Play. Of course it’s the same on iOS, and were iOS sideloading a thing, I’ve no doubt the same kind of difficult crap would get in there as well.”
Darknexus you are a complete moron. All you have to do is run a app on android like SD Maid to get “Your shiny clean removal” as you so stupidly put it.