Bill Gates constantly climbs and descents the richest person in the world crown. If you think, whether he could be anymore rich, he believes the answer is yes! In a recent interview, he cites how Microsoft was crippled by the US Antitrust investigation. He considers that if not for those constraints, the company’s Windows Mobile operating system would’ve thrived.
Speaking at The New York Times’ DealBook Conference, he said, “There’s no doubt that the antitrust lawsuit was bad for Microsoft, and we would have been more focused on creating the phone operating system and so instead of using Android today you would be using Windows Mobile. If it hadn’t been for the antitrust case… we were so close, I was just too distracted. I screwed that up because of the distraction.”
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He also spilled the beans on one big missed opportunity.
“We were just three months too late on a release Motorola would have used on a phone, so yes it’s a winner takes all game. Now nobody here has ever heard of Windows Mobile, but oh well. That’s a few hundred billion here or there.”
Pedaling back around 10 years or so, you might recall the Motorola Droid series, which opened doors for Android in the American market. So, we think this could very well be the Motorola handset he mentioned.
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Anyhow, bygones are bygones! Business is all about striking the right spot. If slip, it could make or break. Bill realizes this and he considers losing to Android his greatest mistake ever, which cost him $400 billion.
And as far as Antitrust laws are concerned, Professor Tim Wu of Columbia University rightly puts it as “the curse of bigness”.
You may watch the full interview below:
