Without antitrust investigation, Windows Mobile would have dominated Android ... according to Bill Gates

According to the founder of Microsoft, the company paid its various lawsuits for abuse of dominant position in the 90s and 2000s and failed to anticipate the rise of smartphones.
Bill Gates says it himself, having let Android scoop the near totality of the mobile market is his "  biggest mistake". How could the company, which dominated the world with Windows, let the Google system settle permanently on smartphones around the world?

"  Too distracted  " by the judicial investigations, Bill Gates missed the explosion of the smartphone

The founder of Microsoft explains it through anti-competitive investigations conducted by the US Department of Justice. The software publisher was summoned to explain its practices, judged by the regulatory authorities as an abuse of dominant position.

At the DealBook conference organized by the New York Times, Bill Gates admits he was "  too distracted  " by these different court cases and spent more time defending Windows than preparing the future of the company: " We would have been more focused on creating the phone's operating system and so instead of using Android today, you would use Windows Mobile if there had not been the antitrust case  . "

" Without the antitrust case ... we were so close, I was too distracted. I messed up because of the distraction,  "he adds.

Arriving too late on a market dominated by Google, Microsoft failed to replicate the success of Windows

Yet Microsoft already had an eye on the mobile with its operating system for Windows Mobile phone. If the interface was very rudimentary and not adapted to the phones, it laid the technological bases and defined the uses that are still today those of smartphone users.

The philanthropist now concludes by regretting the current situation and the loss of this imposing market that "  Microsoft should have naturally won  ", estimating that his company has lost nearly 400 billion dollars by not positioning itself from the outset on the market. mobile.

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The publisher launched a few years later Windows Phone and bought Nokia to design its own phones. Late compared to Android, and to a lesser extent iOS, Microsoft stopped its mobile business just months after the arrival of its new CEO Satya Nadella.

Source: 9to5Google