Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has admitted that his biggest mistake was losing to Android in the mobile operating system (OS) race. RT’s Boom Bust discusses how Microsoft and other big techs made big mistakes.
Android is now the main “non-Apple”
platform, controlling around 75 percent of the OS market. Despite
Microsoft succeeding in developing major OS and software for computers
and laptops, its Windows mobile enjoys a tiny market share, which is a
big loss for the company.
“Bill Gates did not foresee that eventually… computers would be in our phone and in our pocket,” investigative journalist Ben Swann told Boom Bust. He also said that besides losing out on this opportunity, Microsoft search engine Bing was also not a success.
Microsoft is not alone in its mishaps in the digital era. For example, the once incredibly popular Blackberry failed to keep the leading position and is now like a “urban legend.” Blackberry got into trouble because of its own “arrogance,” according to Swann, as the company was expecting the fast-developing market and public to “wait for them.”
American company Kodak is another example of a once-successful firm sinking into oblivion, despite once being on the cutting edge of new film processes and digital photography. While its time may simply have passed, its biggest failure was to sell film instead of cameras, the journalist believes.