It’s a wound that continues to bleed at Microsoft. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella acknowledged that giving up on Windows Phone and mobile devices was a mistake. “I think there might be some way to make it work,” Nadella said in an interview with Business Insider.
Is there some kind of real strategic mistake or just a wrong decision that you regret in retrospect?, they asked Nadella, CEO of the technology company since 2014. A few months after taking office, the manager decided to cancel the multimillion-dollar agreement related to the Nokia phone business. At the time, he explained that it was part of a strategy to grow an independent telephone business.
“I think the decision that a lot of people are talking about, and one of the most difficult decisions I made when I became CEO, was our exit from what I will call the mobile phone, as it was defined then,” responded the now leader of Microsoft. In retrospect, he said, maybe it would have worked “reinventing the computing category between PCs, tablets and phones.”
Microsoft confirmed in mid-2017 that Windows Phone was dead. And Nadella said that same year that he was always against the business with Nokia. He voted against it when his predecessor, Steve Ballmer, proposed buying Nokia in 2012 to shore up the company’s mobile division. «It was too late to recover the ground we had lost. “We were chasing the taillights of our competitors,” he said in his book.Hit Refresh».
CEOs lament over Microsoft’s failure with Windows Phone
Nadella is already the third Microsoft CEO to admit mistakes about his mobile developments. His co-founder and former CEO, Bill Gates, also recognized it as his biggest fault. «The biggest mistake I have made is any mismanagement I have committed that has caused Microsoft to not be what Android is. That is, Android is the standard non-Apple phone platform,” he said in 2019. “It was natural for Microsoft to win.”
Google bought Android in 2005. Eric Schmidt, the search giant’s former CEO, acknowledged in 2012 that Google’s initial strategy was to surpass Microsoft’s early efforts with its Windows Mobile.
And Ballmer, who tried it with Nokia, simply couldn’t see it in time. An anecdote sums it up: He even laughed at the iPhone in an interview for not having a keyboard. He called it “the most expensive phone in the world” and unable to attract business customers.
“I regret that there was a period in the early 2000s when we were so focused on what we needed to do with Windows that we couldn’t redeploy the talent to the new device called the Phone,” Ballmer explained in 2013. “That’s what I regret the most.”