During the Village Global event, Bill Gates, Microsoft founder, CEO and creator of Windows, went on a talk show. He confessed that he made the biggest mistake ever made.
He said that software, especially platform, is a winner-only business, and that software engineers need big sacrifice for entrepreneurs to win big. And I heard that Microsoft did not make Android the biggest mistake I ever made. Android is now a standard smartphone platform in addition to iOS. He added that there is only one seat in the operating system besides Apple, and that the value is more than $ 400 billion from M (Microsoft) to G (Google).
In the foreign market, Microsoft’s mistake is that it does not take users into account, considering too much about economic growth. The appeal of Apple’s high-end style and design is that Steve Jobs was intuitively aware of the existence of the human user.
Meanwhile, Android, which was acquired by Google in 2005, has been developing based on the idea of Linux, an open source operating system. Developed based on open source, Android has been adopted by many smartphone manufacturers around the world. It is completely different from the completely independent, self-regulating world of Apple.
In 2007, when the iPhone was launched, Microsoft released a portable music player, Zune, to compete against the Apple iPod. Steve Ballmer, co-founder and CEO of Microsoft at the time, said that the iPhone, which combines an iPod and a mobile phone, will be available for $ 499. “The expensive $ 499 phone is not attractive to customers around the world.”
Ballmer, who was pursuing the hardware business, had a bad relationship with Bill Gates, who mainly worked in the software business, and eventually retired from Microsoft in 2014. Ballmer said in an interview in 2016 that Microsoft was too late to enter the mobile phone market, and that Apple’s business model, which includes expensive mobile phone deals divided into usage fees, was innovative.
Microsoft has developed Windows Mobile and Windows 10 Mobile, but has not been able to break Android’s competitor Apple iOS and Android, which boasts 75% of the global market share. Finally, on December 10, last year, Windows 10 Mobile support has been terminated and the mobile operating system is not being developed.
In some cases, Microsoft’s inability to create a mobile platform like Android is not just a mistake, but rather a lack of vision for Bill Gates himself. For more information, please click here .