David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…A lot, actually, is right. Microsoft was obsessed with all sorts of things, and particularly Bill Gates for decades before they became true. One of which was Bill Gates was always talking about mobile computing, so much so that in the key slide in the Windows XP presentation, one of the big bullet points is mobile computing. All the way back in 2001. Gates thought natural user interfaces was going to be a thing. Multitouch tablet computing. Pen computing. I had a Microsoft XP tablet edition I think is what it was called PC in college. From the early 2000 and sometimes even before that, these were Bill Gates’s visions of the future that he thought were pretty close. In the world of, I suppose they were early smartphones, Microsoft had developed Windows Mobile. What was this? Is that like iOS? Not really. What Windows Mobile was was an operating system for handset makers to adopt and put on their handsets. These things looked like Blackberries. They’re mostly keys with a little screen. When you looked at it, it looked like Windows. It had a little start menu. It was much like the rest of the enterprise strategy, David, designed around all working seamlessly together with your Windows PC, Exchange, and your corporate network. Because surely people at home, consumers were not using smartphones. These were for business people who were issued by their enterprise. So it fits pretty squarely into the enterprise category. Now, how did Microsoft think about this product? They thought about it as an ingredient into the handset maker’s product. Microsoft was somewhat at the whim of an OEM in the computer ecosystem. The Dell could install some more stuff on top of Windows and customize the installation, but it was still Windows XP no matter who the PC was from. It was a pretty standard thing. That really wasn’t the case with Windows Mobile phones. The handset makers could modify the code of Windows Mobile. When you bought a handset, first and foremost, you were trusting the product quality of the people at the handset maker. They had several OSes that they could buy and effectively start from. One of which was Microsoft. We’re handset makers. We make a phone, and we know how to interconnect and do all the carrier stuff with the carriers because they’re our partners. We need it to do a bunch of computer stuff, too, like email and stuff, so can you guys do all that? Then we’ll make sure when we get that from you that we’ll start changing your code to make it work with our phone, and we’ll do all the phony stuff.…

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