“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.]
So M$ isn’t first in mobile because some engineer said CE sucked and Bill Gates said kthxbye?
There’s the actual next step of building the alternative, which could have sucked just as hard. I went out with a few buddies last week with the intent of outlining the next great American novel. We ended up passing out on my basement floor.
The intent to do a thing and its execution have nothing to do with each other – something Apple teaches companies like M$ every time Redmond spews vapor and Apple actual brings a device to market.
In any way intimating that M$’s lack of dominance hinged on this exchange is kind of stupid. If anything, M$ lost out on a chance to hype a product in advance that it had no intent of delivering.
@Rot’nApple
“Thank God Gates shot down Kodesh’s ideas and point of view…”
While I agree & am exceedingly thankful that Gate’s shot down the idea, I think the article shows that it isn’t really god that we have to thank for this.
What is does is give the lie to the idea of Gate’s brilliance as a geek, getting M$ to where it is (was?). It was stupid luck, and Gate’s being shrewd at business. Gate’s has never been a visionary. Just shrewd & lucky.
And Ballmer is just the punchline to a really bad joke.
As mentioned above Billy boy still has no real idea when you se his reaction to the iPad. He still seems to think that a fully fledged but inappropriate OS milking battery life and adding bulk is the answer despite the fact that it is unable to offer a worthwhile multi touch based interaction to the user and thus makes it much less useful than a laptop or indeed a netbook when considering overall use characteristics. He then decides because of these problems you simply add more spaghetti to this complex mess of a mixture and solve the problem by adding a further mix of speech and real keyboard.
Yup this guy is a genius in the same way that the guy who proposed adding more horses to the cart to compete against the car was a genius when faced with starting again from scratch.
The universe where MS work’s is … Dead… Or was just an illusion in their eyes…
Look at what they just did for the Zune HD users. Tnks for buying it. But is a dead platform now!
To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Gates simply didn’t know what he didn’t know. All he could see was somehow leveraging the Windows/Office monopoly in a very, very narrow way. There could have been several other ways to do this.
And BTW, isn’t MS really at least fourth or fifth on the pecking order behind Apple, RIM, Android and Nokia?
No one loathes Micro$oft as much as I do, but the fact is that they have at least another decade ahead of survival. The truth is that 60-70% of all computers are bought by business and Apple is notorious in the Enterprise for not working with business the way business expects (i.e., the way Micro$oft works with them). The Enterprise market alone will keep them afloat for quite some time (until, that is, the business world wakes up and realizes just how much their crappy PCs are really costing them).
It’s a depressing thought, really: M$ is here to stay (while they will almost certainly be eliminated fairly quickly from the mobile market, Windoze OS and Word/Excel/PP are here to stay for some time…).
Of course, if Apple were to use some of their $40 billion and lower their margins (from 35% to say 20%) for a year or two, we would see the demise of M$ much sooner. But I guess many Apple shareholders (of which I am one, btw) would object (even though the increased market share would not seriously impact profit. Oh well…
@MacMan
Plus don’t count them out on giving up locking in the internet with Windows. There are many technologies they have given businesses to make sure that IE will only work on their net based workflow and initiatives. Lock the net with IE/Windows and you perpetuate your monopoly. Guaranteed.
The irony of this to me is we now have NeXTStep/OpenStep/OS X/iPhone OS on all these different devices, from the desktop to portables to now the tablet, and that was GATES’S “vision”! HE wanted Windoze leveraged onto everything coming down the pike, and Windoze wasn’t up to the challenge. And now we see (surprise, surprise) that M$ wasn’t willing to do the work to optimize Windoze for each device and, therefore, each user experience like Steve insists upon.
I also don’t understand how a man who repeatedly makes decisions like that can remain the richest person in the world for 14 out of the last 15 YEARS! Decisions like that would have brought down lesser companies. Maybe it’s unfolding in slow motion, but I’d like to see M$ have to deal with the consequences of making fucked up decisions like that over time.
Apple was on the brink because of choices just like that (“Let’s give away the keys to the kingdom. No big deal.”). When will it be M$’s turn? And who’s going to come back in save THEM? Bill GATES? Mr. “The Road Ahead” himself? Yeah, right.
Peace.
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Olmecmystic
P.S. By comparison in the year in question, 2001, Apple dropped the original iTunes on the masses, the world’s FIRST 15″ (titanium) laptop, the original OS X, the first several of many Apple retail stores, AND the original iPod.
Here’s my big question: Could Microsoft have “started from scratch”? Have they ever? With anything?!?
I am trying to think of a single successful product Microsoft ever created from scratch. (Successful, so Microsoft Bob doesn’t count.) To the best of my knowledge, every single successful piece of software Microsoft has ever produced began as something either purchased or ripped off from another company.
It goes all the way back to their earliest products. Microsoft Basic was just their own implementation of a common standard. MS-DOS was purchased as Q-DOS. Microsoft Windows’ concepts were first licensed from, then ripped off from Apple.
The current version of Windows can be traced back to Windows NT, which in turn was developed from something purchased from DEC.
“Starting from scratch”, i.e. “innovation”, just isn’t in Microsoft’s DNA. It’s just not what they do.
——RM
From LinkedIn:
Harel Kodesh’s Experience
Currently Group President at Amdocs
(Public Company; Telecommunications industry)
Vice President IAD Microsoft
(Public Company; Telecommunications industry)
1990 — 2000 (10 years )
Group Lead Ready Systems
(Telecommunications industry)
1987 — 1989 (2 years )
Gee, . . . I thought that Bill Gates was one of Steve Jobs’ most admired people, even though Microsoft and Windows were an anathema to Apple.
What a loser! . . . The second richest person on earth.
Not completely right article.. Gates (Microsoft + Gates Foundation Money) is still the richest man.. Same case can be argued with Walton family (Wal-mart)..
MS thought it could shoehorn a desktop OS into a handheld form factor and people would buy it, Even Windoze fanboys think WinMo is toxic.
Correct me if I’m wring, but isn’t it:
1. Nokia (if you can call their products “smart” phones)
2. RIM
3. Apple (passing RIM and day now)
4. MS
5. Google (quickly gaining on MS)
I mean correct me if I’m “wrong”.
I see the irony.
align said: “‘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.”
MS has mostly cared what enterprise wanted. MS grew their OS dominance through enterprise. First, from companies using their OS and then from people essentially being functionally required to use the same OS at home (either from a software perspective or from a “I can only learn one OS” perspective). They never really had to cared what CONSUMERS wanted.
The iPod and iPhone were both aimed at consumers and were designed for ease of use. While MS and or MS & partners offered more choice (theoretically, at least, PlaysForShit), they did not actually think about user experience. They never had to do that and apparently never wanted to.
Left to do only that, MS can actually make something good. Xbox and Xbox360 are both good, competitve gaming systems.
For mobile devices, I think Microsoft COULD do it technically. They have fine programmers and engineers. However, it is against their corporate DNA and against their top level view of how to make software. So they won’t do it for quite some time. Maybe Ray Ozzie will shock us with their cloud…
Windows design is to blame. You can’t properly scale down Windows efficiently. With OS X, Apple has shown it can be done masterfully.
In the end, it’s still the Mac OS beating up on the Windows OS.
Not that anyone clamors for the return of OS 9, it just goes to show that Apple did the right thing buying NeXt. Probably one day will go down as the single greatest acquisition in tech history (if it isn’t already).
Try telling a roomful of otherwise well educated people that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer do not understand technology, and are not really very smart. You will get nothing but argument. I know,; I’ve done it.
DRMSSDB said:
“They (MS) never really had to cared what CONSUMERS wanted.”
Totally agree. Notice I said customers, not consumers. Customers, MS has decided, are the enterprise and OEMs. But ask even enterprise guys these days if they think MS listens to them. In fact, I think if it wasn’t for Linux rearing its enterprise head that they would probably listen to them even less. MS flat out thought they had an undefeatable monopoly for awhile and totally acted like they did.
Indeed I agree, MS’s great failure has been that since the end user was not their customer, they developed virtually no consumer sales or marketing experience whatsoever and it’s absolutely killing them today. Look at the bloatware that comes preloaded on most Windows systems now. About as anti-consumer as you can get, but the OEMs love it.
Agree also that MS has good people that could do lots of things, but I don’t know if MS can bring itself to turn the ship and admit that windows everywhere, at least in it’s current form, just won’t cut it, and after a decade it indeed may be too late to start over like they should have. It must be galling for Bill and MS to see Steve Jobs and Apple succeed at this (OS X is in most of Apple’s products now) while MS has failed utterly.
And I may be wrong, but I don’t have a lot of faith in Ozzie either. Ozzie did Lotus Notes, and while it had a lot of great ideas and power, just like Windows, the interface sucked imho and it crippled it. It’s primary function that users needed above all else, email, was perhaps it’s worst feature. Apple’s genuis is harnessing great power with great interfaces, while I swear a lot of MS’s culture still secretly yearn to go back to keyboard commands and command lines and views Windows’ interface as a dos shell toy for newbs.
And don’t get me started on the cloud. Trust me, MS would love that, they’re dying to go back to the mainframe days and “rent” you everything so they’d have a continual source of revenue but could pull the plug on a whim. No thanks.
Gates has always understood that Jobs’ creativity runs rings around him… and this so perfectly shows why. Presented by Kodesh with a clear black and white picture of what needed to be done to regain the edge, Gates held onto the past with both hands and couldn’t understand the simple, obvious vision.
Even Gates’s ability to copy and bully and cheat has atrophied in the face of smarter competition from Apple and Google – no wonder he felt the need to get out, and try to buy the respect he felt was lacking.
Gates rejected the suggestions. “It’s very disappointing you feel that way,” he told Kodesh. “We don’t have time to start from scratch.”
The rest of Gates’ reply read…
“However, we have the time to create the best crapware in the world to kill ourselves unconstrained by the needs of the rest of the company”.
They didn’t have to start from scratch, they could have bought another company and screwed it up. Oh wait, they already did that several times. There are several examples, but Danger is most obvious recent one pertinent to this discussion.
I always laugh when some lost person says “Well, that Bill Gates! He was always ahead of the pack on everything!” As if Bill Gates ever had a successful futurist prediction in his life. HardyHarHar.
The guy was a parasite on the entire computer community and clearly was a parasite within his own company. I have to wonder if ever in history anyone made so much money for doing so little.
If the MS board has a brain cell between them they’d boot Gates out of the chairman’s chair and send him packing. It’s possible MS could one day actually contribute to the computer community. But having the spectre of Gates hanging around is a definitive hinderance.
Then there’s Ballmer, the marketing moron who thought he could rule…
@edster
Your story makes me want to tell mine: The resident teen here dropped her iPhone and cracked the glass in the corner. Everything still worked, but she had a friend replace the glass for her. After that the backlight wouldn’t work nor would the touchscreen. She took it into the Apple store and simply told them her phone wouldn’t work. Lucky for her they didn’t ask any questions about the phone’s history. Within 10 minutes she walked out with a brand new one. She was already a satisfied customer but now she’ll be checking the “Very Satisfied” box if she is ever part of a customer survey.
Classic Microsoft arrogance, hubris and complacency led to its current irrelevance in mobile computing. The company figured its dominance of the desktop would be extended to smartphones and similar devices by mere fiat and leveraging of its brand. Except that, unlike the desktop arena (which Microsoft dominated not by meritorious product offerings but rather by a combination of sheer luck, illicit business practices and savvy decisions in the early 80’s) when it comes to mobile computing — surprise, surprise — people are actually demanding products that work well, and Windows mediocrity, which people tolerated on the desktop because it was the tax paid for low-cost computing, simply doesn’t cut it anymore. Now, for the first time in its existence, Microsoft is forced to compete in a marketplace on merit alone, and is unsurprisingly coming up short. On the desktop, Microsoft reaped billions by staying away from the headaches and low margins of the hardware game and churning out cruddy software for that hardware. Now, it is clear that a synergy between hardware and software is necessary to create the preeminent user experience, as Apple has ably proven. Karma’s a bitch.