Bill Gates confesses Windows phone rollout was ‘clearly a mistake’
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates may be devoting more time to running his philanthropic foundation than to day-to-day operations in Redmond these days, but that doesn’t mean he’s satisfied with how things are going at the company he founded, particularly where mobility is concerned.
screenshot video interview between Bill Gates and Charles Rose
In an interview with CBS This Morning‘s Charlie Rose on Monday, Gates admitted he wasn’t pleased with Microsoft’s performance in the mobile market, going as far as to characterize the company’s smartphone strategy as “a mistake.”
“We didn’t miss cell phones,” Gates said. “But the way that we went about it didn’t allow us to get the leadership, so it’s clearly a mistake.”
According to recent research from comScore, Microsoft’s share of the smartphone market actually shrunk during the three months ending December 2012, leaving it with a paltry 2.9 per cent.
This figure is less than half the share commanded by BlackBerry during the same period, a company to which pundits routinely describe as “struggling,” “embattled,” “beleaguered,” and so on.
In 2011, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confidently told a meeting of financial analysts that he had high hopes that Windows Phone would soon become the third most popular smartphone platform. But given the market performance of Windows Phone 8 so far, even that comparatively meager milestone still looks out of reach.
Asked by Rose if he’s happy with chief executive officer Steve Ballmer’s performance, Gates said, “Well, he and I are two of the most self-critical people — you can imagine. And here were a lot of amazing things that Steve’s leadership got done with the company in the last year. Windows 8 is key to the future, the Surface computer. Bing, people are seeing as a better search product, Xbox.”
“But is — is it enough?” he said. “No, he and I are not satisfied that in terms of, you know, breakthrough things, that we’re doing everything possible.”
Check out the interview here
I love my Nokia Lumia WP <3