Bill Gates: 'Microsoft didn't MISS cell phone' bandwagon This was the week when US President Barack Obama let everyone know that Google Hangouts are a thing! POTUS indulged in a little "Fireside Hangout" to chat about issues raised in his earlier State of the Union address. When asked about software patents and the patent snarking that goes on, Obama came down hard on patent trolls, …
I'd rather they wasted £100M on RasPis that some kids may not use than several magnitudes more on failed government IT projects. If doing that gets even a small number of kids to be interested in computing and create their own tech start ups when they grow up, the return on investment will dwarf the waste. Kids are smart when given the right tools and support: http://youngrewiredstate.org/
For a start you need to add the cost of a monitor, keyboard and mouse at minimum, that significantly increases the cost. Then there's the logistics of enough power sockets and where they gonna put all this stuff when not in use? Sure they could get the kids to plug them in instead of the PCs in the IT class rooms but then, you could just boot linux off those machines and save £25 on the Pi... Lets not start on can all the teachers use them well enough to teach programming.
If patents were what they should be, NPE's would not be such a bad thing -- they would just be one way that inventors could monetize an invention. NPE's would not just sue people, but actively market their patents to try to get actual manufacturers to use (and thus license) the inventions they have under their control.
Unfortunately, it is far to easy to get patents on simple things, and having a patent gives you far, far too much power to extort companies and enterpreneurs that have already invested heavily in using an idea that they didn't know was patented. The costs of inadvertantly infringing some nonsense patent are far too high, and it is almost impossible not to do so.
These root causes have to be fixed, and the NPE problem will go away. Conversely, you cannot fix things by just attacking NPE's, because they are just a symptom, and not the root problem.
Another ineptly handled fool fest of corporate moronity....
"Yeah Yeah - hey they have all bought out mobile phones...... (5 years later)
Yeahhhhh I have an idea, lets bring out a mobile phone too!!!"
(The crawlers chorus)
"Ohhhhh William - you so just like umm Rock daddy oh."
Windows Mobile along with Symbian was one of the earliest smartphone platforms. 2002 was the year one of the first Windows Mobile phones was released, but the OS itself had been on PDA for much longer.
The first Symbian phone was in 2000. So Microsoft wasn't that far behind.
It was when Apple redefined the smartphone in 2007 that Microsoft took their time to respond.
Google are the late comers, they didn't have a phone of any kind until 2008.
True my friend. It wasn't Microsoft was late to the party, it executed it's own party poorly and almost crushed the PDA/Early-smartphone market into submission because it was very terribly run. Sometimes someone else has to make a mistake first before another company can learn from those without any cost and then succeed (like Apple's case with the iPhone). Right time, right product, right opportunity.
Google just took the easy option and sold Android to the cheapest bidder (open-source parts of it). Anyone will be happy to take software for nothing.
Well what WAS Microsoft doing in all that time? Oh that's right...they had the Dragon Lady (Roz Ho) utterly destroy Danger, which helped their braintrust run over to Google to create Android. And then Roz Ho fumbled whatever the hell Project Pink was supposed to be, leading to a Kin-tastic Krash-and-burn in the market.
And yet she still hasn't been fired. I wish I could fail upwards like that. And we wonder why Microsoft has lost it's edge? The rot goes deeper than Ballmer.
> Google are the late comers, they didn't have a phone of any kind until 2008.
Yes they did, they had the iphone.
It ran google search, google maps and gmail.
What else would google want? The only reason android exists is because Apple wouldn't continue to use Google services of its own accord.
What this whole mobile drama is basically showing is that Microsoft has no feel for innovation what so ever. Sure; they have some nice ideas and such here and there (sometimes controversial; look at the ribbon for example) but basically nothing fully innovating.
Look at their mobile stuff; at first with CE and Windows Mobile the whole idea was to make the phone look and feel like Windows. Including the start menu. Sometimes that really didn't add up at all. And don't get me started on that stupid stylus you always needed...
Basically: their main revenue came from desktop and as such everything should be modelled after it.
Now they finally discovered touch and found a pretty good working interface for their phone. I really like Metro on the Windows Phone itself since it allows you to quickly add and remove stuff and in general gives you quick access to the features you quickly want / need to access.
Yet now they're trying to go the other way around; it seems MS puts more value into mobile than desktop and as such, you guessed it, all should be based on the mobile segment.
Basically; they hope the new revenue comes from mobile and as such everything should be modelled after it.
So; what happens when it turns out they're wrong and the desktop segment turns out to be larger than anticipated. Or worse; it doesn't WANT to be "pushed" ?
MS didn't miss the bandwagon; they simply ruined all the opportunities they had.
"but the way that we went about it didn't allow us to get the leadership"
Excuse me?! Listen Billy the street punter thinks mobile, they think iPhone, Blackberry, Android, then you start to get names like Nokia, Samsung, etc mentioned then finally after that lot you get Mr Average Punter thinking, "Really the Windows computer people actually make a mobile phone do they? Well I never!". Honestly, two of my relatives have said almost that exact phrase. Average, typical street punters think Windows=Computer, let alone even remotely thinking about Windows=Mobile Phone!
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