“At one point, Microsoft crowed about how Handheld PC, Palm-Size PC (then Pocket PC), then Windows Mobile, then Windows Phone Edition, would rule the world,” Cane writes. “Microsoft owned the desktop, so domination of mobile technology was only logical. It wouldn’t surprise me that Microsoft considered it was just about its birthright too.”
Cane asks, “So how is it that Apple is dominating mobile devices? How is it that Apple is set to revolutionize all of computing within a few weeks with its iPad? The seeds of Microsoft’s destruction were planted over a decade ago, in a decision made by Bill Gates himself, when he was still the final word on all things Microsoft.”
Quoting an excerpt from Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft (2001) by David BankIn, Cain highlights how Harel Kodesh, an Israeli-born engineer in charge of Microsoft’s efforts on non-PC devices and who had helped develop Windows CE for “consumer electronics” such as handhelds, cell phones, set-top boxes, and the voice-activated “Auto PC” for car dashboards, “wrote a memo to Gates and Ballmer under the heading ‘Starting from Scratch.’ We need to kill Windows CE for those categories, he argued. Win32 is not an advantage; it’s a tax on device design. It served to further Microsoft’s strategy but not to help consumers. Given all their other alternatives, electronics manufacturers wouldn’t pay the tax. Kodesh wanted to take a small group of developers and work solely on developing the best software for information appliances, unconstrained by the needs of the rest of the company.”
Gates rejected the suggestions. “It’s very disappointing you feel that way,” he told Kodesh. “We don’t have time to start from scratch.”
Kodesh left Microsoft several months later.
Much more in the full article — recommended — here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Tim B.” for the heads up.]
Gates, with WinMo, made the same error he made with regards to Google’s cloud apps: Expecting the world to embrace ‘MSOffice-centric” world.
But poor Bill doesn’t realize that the masses don’t really need portable versions of PowerPoint, Word or Excel.
Kodesh sounds like a smart guy. No wonder he left.
I’ll bet ya that Kodesh then went to apple after that!
Windows as a swiss army knife. Brilliant. Windows tried to be all things to all people and support all hardware and in doing so therefore winds up being the proverbial jack of all trades and master of none.
So then carrying the analogy further, it goes without saying then that when it comes to a mobile product, do you now want to carry a keychain fob with a file, a small knife and maybe a light, or do you want to haul a big ass swiss army knife with you??
Should’ve listented to the guy Bill…
Ha Ha Ha!!!! Bill Gates, what an incredible loser!!!
The other half of the WinTel family went through a comparable course decision, but with very different results.
Some of us recall when, for Intel, raw cycle speed was all that mattered. But they were coming up against a wall. Power consumption and heat were rising, but things weren’t getting much faster. Intel’s Israel team argued for a major change in architecture, but HQ resisted. The battle went on for months. Ultimately the Israeli team won out. The end result was Centrino, Core, and the current i-processors. (It’s all documented in Signor and Singer’s “Start-Up Nation”.)
“We don’t have time to start from scratch”
Where have I heard that lately?
Harold Kodesh:
http://www.emc.com/about/emc-at-glance/exec-team/kodesh.htm
Another great observation:
“To Kodesh, Microsoft’s initiatives were driven by the dictates of the company’s technology, rather than the wishes of consumers.”
Bingo. Once upon a time, MS actually listened to and cared about what their customers wanted. Now it what MS wants from their customers that matters.
Or as someone else put it so well once, MS software used to work for you. Now it works for MS.
Two words: Uncle Fester
Haha TT, good point!
MS is so lucky that IBM were clueless with how MS BS their way into getting their OS ( which didn’t exist, then purchased of a clone OS ) sold for their PCs. How lucky for MS to negotiate access of Apple crown jewels to use for their Windows OS from that sugar water CEO who had no balls to stand up against them. If you dig hard, MS has never really invented, innovated anything close to what Apple has done from the get go.
Now we know where the “sloth” in Microsloth came from
Let me tell you a story about a man named Ed…
I’ll probably be repeating this story a few times in the coming days. I used to have an iPhone 3GS. Last week, the same day I was boarding a plane for a trip to Las Vegas, my iPhone quit talking to ATTs 3G network. No calls, no SMS, no internet.
I arrive in Vegas and first thing next day I find the closest Apple store (In Fashion Square Mall). Make online genius appointment for same day right after lunch. (There were morning appts still available too) I go into the store and spend 30 min with Apple tech. Determine that indeed the 3G chip got fried and walked out with brand new 3GS phone 30 min later for FREE!
At that point in time, I’m saying to myself, and my wife who is only half listening, that I’m pretty glad I have an Apple phone, since I would have been out of business for several days, almost definitely for entire vacation, with ANY OTHER brand of phone. Including the Nexus One, some WiMo POS, Palm, BB or whatever. This is why Apple is dominating.
That explains Bill Gates’ comment after the iPad presentation in January that he did not see anything that he wished Microsoft had done. He just doesn’t get it.
MS software as Swiss Army Knife;
The Swiss Army Knife is a fine tool in and if itself.
But when my contractors show up, I notice that they don’t just bring Swiss Army Knives.
Microsoft is like the 1950’s. yesterdays news
Microsoft has BET THEIR FUTURE on maintaining a price for an OS by itself, whether installed by a PC maker or by an individual.
That OS cost is now the largest cost of sub-00 PCs from what I recall. MS has not seen and understood the convergence of hardware, software OS, apps & user interface in a seamless device.
Ballmer is doing everything to protect “Windows” profits and it will doom Microsoft. The slowdown has already become evident from Desktops, Laptops, handheld notepad-iPads, phones.
The view of the arrogance of elite billionaires lost in the cloud of their own desires @ 40,000 feet in their own 757 bubble plane is sad to have seen.
Real world & really better new products are not imagined, prototyped and hashed and mashed together in boardrooms.
They are designed, planned & executed by & for people who are associated from the average citizen & his world.
@KiLleR: “Ha Ha Ha!!!! Bill Gates, what an incredible loser!!!”
Need to make that,’an incredibly RICH loser!!!’
Thank God Gates shot down Kodesh’s ideas and point of view. Otherwise we might all be listening on the most popular MP3 Player “The Zune” and Zunecasts and buying all our smart phone apps from “The MarketPlace” instead of those items being MS feeble attempt at catching up to Apple and trying to be a relevant company.
The story of Ed is the perfect example why Apple will win in the end. It is just the whole widget, and that includes OS, applications, hardware, peripherals, support, service, retail, plus heavy integration with content providers.
Nobody else will ever come close.
And on the subject of topic, Bill Gates never really had much vision. All he was is a shrewd (read: unscrupulous) business man. At some point, he had some talented engineers, who were able to churn out software that was acceptable. But never anything revolutionary. Windows won not on merit, but on business deals and wrangling.
Nobody should forget Bill’s first edition of “The Road Ahead” where his opinions on the importance of the internet were so wildly off the mark:
…“popularity of the Internet is the most important single development in the world of computing since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981, but today’s Internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway, the information highway I envisioned would be as different from the Internet as the Oregon Trail was to Interstate 84.”
The book came out in the November of 1995. Amazon.com begun operations almost two years earlier…!!!
I like the preview of the book, the java/sun legal case thing. Worth a read, how the MS top executives discuss strategy:
“I think Steve [Ballmer] feels totally overwhelmed right now. He does not know how he’s going to solve the problems and he doesn’t know who he’ll be able to count on.”
Who needs Gates? Ballmer seems to be doing a splendid job of acting like a bald ape and sinking Microshaft.
This just proofs that Microsoft got on top by shear luck and kept it’s momentum by coercive business practices. Microsoft is going down. I don’t see Microsoft disappearing completely, but they certainly have lost the clout. This will get even worse for them as time progresses and other players take further market share from them.
@ Ed
Can’t imagine how that would have gone with a Google phone.
“Please submit an email to get support. We’ll get back to you in a few days”
Microsoft tried to start over with Longhorn. They failed had to grab the Windows 2003 base and start over based on Windows Legacy. When they finished they pooped out Windows Vista. While Windows 7 is not new it’s just a patched up Vista. And just goes to show how dysfunctional Microsoft is and how poor it’s management is. Microsoft will never again try to revolutionize and rewrite Windows from the ground up. It just going to milk what it has till the market dries up. Ballmer is hoping that he’ll have his Advertising baby running by then so he can shot Bill Baby (Windows) and just have Microsoft focus on his Baby! BING.