Bill Gates on making “one of the greatest mistakes of all time”

Re:Bill Gates on making “one of the greatest mistakes of all... by AnimalMuppet on Saturday June 22, 2019 @07:11PM (#20252220)

Yes, it's a high-level managerial error (or a series of them) to make a phone that people don't like. Management's job in that situation is 1) figure out what people will want and 2) make what they want.

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.

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Re:Bill Gates on making “one of the greatest mistakes of all... by brownbat on Saturday June 22, 2019 @07:33PM (#20252325)

In the 80s, people wanted a desktop with apps, and Microsoft solved for that by just letting everyone make any app they wanted and not playing gatekeeper.

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.

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