Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…I’m going to tell you why. We’re still on the Paul Allen strategy. We’ve got to do all the software that these things will ever need. It was still of the mindset that said, and there’s an arrogance to that and there’s a hunger to that that says there’s just nothing we shouldn’t do. I don’t think that was a good mindset by the time I took over, and yet it was still baked in with Bill, baked in with me, and I think that was a mistake not focusing. This is like asking me to pick between negative children. I don’t know. But the phone because it was a client-side device, or search because it was a productivity tool. Both of those were Microsoft big businesses. The desktop, the phone, or office, client-side devices, we had done well with a certain model. Client-side devices, our mind should have been able to wrap around, but we had to tell ourselves it didn’t look the same. Technology didn’t look the same, nor did business model. Then business model astonishingly for search. Advertising, call it 2005. I think Google was making more money off of a PC user than Microsoft was because their business model generated more search revenue. By 2005, I don’t think so. Not later on, I think so. But not by 2005. I would suspect not. You can go check that.…

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