“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.]
And, just another thought — someone above posted something to the effect that Microsoft proved the old adage about being a jack of all trades, but master of none. The company’s hubris and arrogance forces it to compete in every arena it can find in order to attempt to assert its relevance and be a “player” — phones, video game consoles, search engines, music players — and yet, with the exception of the XBOX, its efforts in all those areas inevitably lead to mediocrity. So, instead of concentrating on a few choice products, and doing them well, with patience and timing, as APple has done, Microsoft goes whole hog and jumps into myriad markets half-cocked, just to show off that they’re in the game.
I see that the article mentions Kodesh’s involvement with Windows CE. That was the only competent version of Windows I’ve ever used — the version that ran the Sega Dreamcast console (RIP). It actually worked very well.