Bill Gates on why he ‘messed’ up Microsoft’s mobile business

Microsoft is a bonafide tech behemoth with its tentacles spread across the technological universe. However, there’s one where it is conspicuously absent and it still rankles it co-founder and one of the world’s richest man, Bill Gates. That area is a mobile operating system and according to a report by CNBC, Gates shed some light on why the company missed that boat.

Speaking at a conference in New York, Gates cited the antitrust case filed by the US government in the 90s against Microsoft as a primary reason. “There’s no doubt the antitrust lawsuit was bad for Microsoft, and we would have been more focused on creating the phone operating system,” Gates said, as per the report by CNBC. He further said that “instead of using Android today, you would be using Windows Mobile if it hadn’t been for the antitrust case.”

The report also states that Gates said that he was “too distracted”. “I was just too distracted. I screwed that up because of the distraction. He also said that the company was “so close” to a mobile operating system but eventually didn’t work out.

This is the second time this year Gates has spoken about Microsoft’s ‘failure’ of not providing an alternative to Apple’s iOS. Earlier this year he had expressed his regret at not coming up with a “non-Apple phone form platform” before Google did. The world’s second richest man said, “You know, in the software world, in particular for platforms, these are winner-take-all markets. 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.”

He further admitted that there was scope for just one operating system apart from Apple to exist and that gap was filled by Google when it could easily have been Microsoft.