Bill Gates: Windows Mobile would be Android now, but Microsoft 'screwed up' the timing
It could have been a very, very different situation, if only Bill Gates wasn’t entirely dedicated to fight the Justice Department’s antitrust probe at the time, admitted Microsoft’s then-CEO in his latest interview for the New York Times:
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.
It turns out that Microsoft, not Google, could have been chosen to provide the operating system for the device that came to market as the OG Motorola DROID on Verizon, and spearaheaded Android’s popularity.
We were so close. I was just too distracted and I screwed that up because of the distraction. We were just three months too late with the release that Motorola would have used on a phone. So it’s a winner-takes-all game, that’s for sure, but now nobody here has even heard of Windows Mobile.
Microsoft is otherwise doing very well, briefly surpassing Apple earlier this year with a $1+ trillion market cap. It’s just a marginal player in phone software now, striking deals for its Office suite being present on Samsung phones, or working on Android launchers. It remains to be seen if the Surface Duo changes that dynamic.