Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

Re:Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations by ekianjo on Monday February 18, 2013 @09:15PM (#5242200)

The PDA market was ridiculously small (I owned one and I hardly knew anyone else who did) and was not growing at the time. PDAs were pricey, and while they could do many of the things that the iPhone did later, most people did not see its value back then. Well, it was a very fragmented market focused only on professionals. It was never aimed to consumers (a big mistake).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations by macspoofing on Monday February 18, 2013 @09:39PM (#5242276)

>Whilst by the year 2000 the entire mobile phone market was around 700 million.

What was the size of the smartphone market? I'd guess it wasn't that big either, certainly it isn't anywhere near present-day numbers. And yes, I am differentiating between "smartphone" and "cell phone" market. The former was small, the latter was huge.

> Well, it was a very fragmented market focused only on professionals. It was never aimed to consumers (a big mistake).

You could say the same for RIM, who was never that interested in building a consumer phone. Many mistakes were made by all incumbents..

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations by ekianjo on Tuesday February 19, 2013 @12:18AM (#5242780)

By the way, you may not be aware of this, but RIM had (and still has, somehow), a huge consumer following in certain countries like Indonesia because of the chat applications it provided ahead of the rest. Until not too long ago it was bigger than the iphone and Android phones there (I need to find a link for that, though...)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations by kingr on Tuesday February 19, 2013 @10:34AM (#5244776)

I live in South Africa. We are one of the countries with a huge RIM following, you can find a black berry device on every street corner.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations by r00fus on Tuesday February 19, 2013 @02:33AM (#5243133)

The iPhone did what it could do because it bundled a data plan that was reasonable at the time ($20/month unlimited, though 2G only, was a pretty damn good deal). Prior to my iPhone I used a Treo 6xx series that Verizon wanted me to pay $45/m for data (2G also).

The lack of native data connectivity made PDAs deal with the continually nasty and ever under-estimated problem of sync. With iPhoneOS v1, Apple matched what Palm had to offer - an iPod touch was almost as good as a Palm PDA, an iPhone better than a Treo. With iOS2 and ActiveSync, it blew away it's competition.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations by robgough on Tuesday February 19, 2013 @07:53AM (#5243976)

Absolutely this. I had an XDA II, then an XDA Mini S pretty much from launch (rebranded HTC phones on O2-UK), but as a student simply couldn't afford the data plans to go with them.

The iPhone (and really, the iPhone 3G for me) is when prices started to become reasonable.. nowadays, you can get decent data plans with (almost) everyone here.

[ Parent | on HN ]