Words you're putting in his mouth. He did not say anything about deserving or certainty; when he says "we did screw up" that's an acknowledgement they had to compete for it, and failed to do that. People who think they deserve things, don't think they have to work hard and compete for them, and they don't reflect on what they did wrong but instead get affronted that the universe didn't simply hand them what the still feel they deserve.

> 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's not quite a sense of entitlement, but Gates definitely thinks Microsoft could have won mobile if Microsoft made better decisions. He doesn't seem to be leaving much room for the idea that Google would have won even if Microsoft had done its best.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pocket_PC_Devices

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Windows_Mobile_devices

It took them three years after iPhone to pivot to something multi-touch, (Windows Phone 7 in late 2010) and on release it had the limitations of the original iPhone release - no copy/paste, no custom rintones - and five years to get something with Windows NT kernel to compete with Apple's "It runs OS X".

If Microsoft had made better decisions, i.e. done what Apple did, and released a multitouch full-not-hobbled-software device as soon as the hardware was up to it, tuning Microsoft hardware and software together like they do now with the Surface range, there wouldn't have been a market gap for Google to enter.

And when Google did enter, the first Android released was the HTC Dream - coming out 18 months after iPhone release - and 6 months after iPhone had been discontinued and superceded - and being designed like a device from 2003. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Dream

If you'd asked people in 2005 who were the contenders for dominating the next decade of consumer mobile computing, what would they say? Would anyone seriously suggest Google anymore than Yahoo! or AOL or Compuserve?

I think that Microsoft may not have been able to do that within their existing form. People didn't want Windows on a phone; they wanted a phone with apps. Microsoft probably tied the phone too much to existing Windows, whereas Android was much more tuned to writing apps for phones.

An MS phone using that model would be interesting. No app store. Just go ahead and run any random app you find on the internet. Probably a security nightmare.

But MS used a similar strategy to challenge Apple once before and did really well, security issues notwithstanding. So I'm kind of surprised they didn't make the same play.

It's also disturbing that one of the most successful businessmen is introspective and learns from mistakes?

It's telling that marketing / branding / repuation doesn't factor into his internal model of Android vs. Windows phone.

At the time, google was doing a good job of branding itself ("do no evil") as an open, transparent (at least in terms of source code) and interoperable member of the community.

(oh how times / perceptions have changed...)

So google and had a lot of good faith with developers who were unhappy with Microsoft's ethics/business practices, browser war schennanigans, etc...

This played no small role in Android's early adoption and ultimate success.

Linux had a different name. Arguably, a better one. One of the weaknesses was software compatibility and UI complexity. Android didn't suffer from the former (as all of that was fixed before phone shipped), and tried to limit the latter with a new UI from the ground up (no X/KDE/GNOME etc).

Companies such as Google and Facebook take security serious. Because they're data driven companies, they want to protect that vehemently.

Once the pieces of the pie are cut out, its extremely hard to get even a small part of the pie. Linux desktop was too late, Windows Phone was too late. Why? Apps/ecosystem. I mean, Windows to this date still barely has a way to update software like Linux had for more than 20 years (APT, for example). You need either Windows Store or a third party one such as Chocolatey or Scoop.

It’s a winner takes all world because that’s how they played the game and they made it that way. We actually had quite a bit of plurality before Windows, the UNIX world put in a tremendous amount of effort to have open standards so you could reasonably build software for multiple platforms. Sun built Java for that world. The industry seemed remarkably open to multiple platforms, which isn’t without problems either, but I think I might like it if we had a few more serious mobile players

How is that?

End of the day, the Microsoft ecosystem just dominated client tech utterly. The previous king of mobile, Blackberry, was basically a hardware version of Microsoft Outlook.

They had tablets and phones years ago, but chose to position them as shitty PCs instead of real devices. Internet Explorer for Windows CE was a steaming pile of shit that has it been something better would have changed many things.

Today Microsoft is in trouble and is running on inertia. In many ways Apple owns higher ed. Google completely dominates K-12. The Windows 10 strategy is designed to make IT people in enterprises fail.

All of that was triggered by the iPhone.

While the original hardware looks more like a Blackberry, and was definitely influenced by the iPhone afterwards, it's also wrong to say we wouldn't have gotten Android without the iPhone.

[0] https://www.androidauthority.com/history-android-os-name-789...

Not really. It's actually doing a lot better than a couple of years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit

Amusingly, the Wikipedia article begins with the line "WebKit is a browser engine used in Apple's Safari browser and other products."

But the DDG preview starts with the line "WebKit is a browser engine used in Google's Chrome browser and other products."

I wonder if there's an edit war going on in that article.