Nobody is perfect. Not even the great tycoons who have taken technology companies to the peak of success. One of these examples is Bill Gates who during an interview recognized What has been the biggest mistake he has made in his time running Microsoft. And the co-founder of Android did not hesitate to mock him through social networks several years after this confession.
Today we all associate the Android operating system with Google, which is the company behind it. But in its beginnings Android was in limbo between Microsoft and Google. This is where Bill Gates’ mistake was, who did not decide to bet on this operating system, causing Google to keep it and get the great performance it has today.
Android co-founder gives a different version of Gates’ “biggest mistake”
It was a few years ago during an interview with Julia Hartz, CEO of Evenbrite, where the Microsoft co-founder acknowledged that the biggest mistake he has made ““It’s the mismanagement that I got involved in that caused Microsoft to not be what Android is.”
This mismanagement caused Google will develop Android before Microsoftand achieved the great success it has today. In addition to the many benefits that Android leaves today for being the operating system with the largest market share, 72.46% global share according to statistics from the end of 2025. This is why a bad decision and problems with antitrust laws meant that this operation was not closed.
Although he tried to do something similar with Windows Phone, it didn’t turn out well as we have already seen. For Bill Gates there is only room for an operating system other than iOS on the market. And this is something that figure at 400,000 million dollars that he lost with this bad decision 20 years ago. He related it in the following way:
The biggest mistake of all was the mismanagement I got into that caused Microsoft to not be what Android is, meaning Android is the standard platform for non-Apple phones. In reality, it is a winner-take-all market. If you have half as many applications or 90% of them, you are on your way to total ruin. There’s room for exactly one non-Apple operating system, and how much is that worth? 400 billion dollars that would be transferred from company G (Google) to company M (Microsoft).
For Gates, this is one of the biggest mistakes in history, and he has no doubt that if he had reached the mobile market before Google, Microsoft would be the company that would be dominating today. Their mistake was leaving Google with Android “free” until it developed Windows Phone.
The best part of this story comes when the co-founder of Android appeared last year to comment on these words through his X account. In a publication he details that his goal when developing Android was to prevent Microsoft from controlling phones “as it did with computers, stifling innovation.”
Click on the image to access the publication.
With this concern that Microsoft could control the mobile world, the co-founder of Android affirms that “Sorry Bill, but you’re more responsible for the $400 billion loss than you think.”
Steve Ballmer, the charismatic former CEO of Microsoft, also spoke on this topic, admitting that this mistake by Microsoft was motivated by overconfidence and “arrogance” focused on the supremacy of the Windows brand. This led them to underestimate the competition and assume that they could dominate any new market by imposing their ecosystem, but evidently this was not the case.
Images | Wikimedia Commons (UK Government)
Via | Windows Central
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A version of this article was published in 2025 in Genbeta
