Speaking at the Economic Club of Washington a week ago, Bill Gates reflected on his time at the head of Microsoft, the company he co-founded 44 years ago with Paul Allen and where he now spends a sixth of his time as a technical advisor, and claimed that his biggest mistake ever was not beating Android in the mobile computing market.
"We missed being the dominant mobile operating system by a very tiny amount," Gates admitted. "We were distracted during our antitrust trial. We didn't assign the best people to do the work. So it's the biggest mistake I made in terms of something that was clearly within our skill set, we were clearly the company that should have achieved that. And we didn't. Ee allowed this Motorola design win, and therefore the software momentum to go to Android. And so it became the dominant non-Apple mobile phone operating system globally."
Gates added that Microsoft would have been far more valuable—as of this writing the Seattle-based software giant is the world's only company valued at over $1 trillion—if they had won the mobile operating system competition and admitted that Android is a huge asset for Google.
A $400 billion mistake
A few days earlier, at an event hosted by the venture firm Village Global in San Francisco, Bill Gates sat down with Eventbrite co-founder and CEO Julia Hartz and admitted that this mistake cost his company $400 billion.
"And it's amazing to me that having made one of the greatest mistakes of all time, and there was this antitrust lawsuit, various things that, our other assets (Windows, Office), are still very strong. So we are a leading company. If we got that one (Android), right, we would be the leading company, but oh, well," sighted Gates.
In front of a group of less than 100 founders, Bill Gates—he's also the co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the chairman of the Branded Entertainment Network, the chairman of TerraPower, the CEO of Cascade Investment—explained that one of the reasons of his dramatic failure was the lack of maniacal focus he and his team had to win the mobile operating system market during that tumultuous period when the company chose to fight the government's antitrust charges.
"In the software world, it's very predictive for platforms, these are winner take all markets," Gates said. "If you're there with half as many apps or 90% as many apps, you're on your way to complete doom, there's room for exactly one non-Apple operating system."
In the conversation with Hartz, Gates also confided that in his early years as an entrepreneur he didn't believe in weekends or vacations but that now he's changed a lot about that.
"I knew everybody's license plate. So I could tell you over the last month when their car came and gone from the parking lot," Gates jokingly said. "Now I take lots of vacation. My 20-year-old self is so disgusted with my current self."
Atherton Research Insights
The key takeaway for entrepreneurs from Bill Gates extraordinary business journey is the maniacal focus that you and your team need to have to execute the company's vision. A strategy that is also encapsulated in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's famous mantra—“Move Fast and Break Things.”
