San Francisco: Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates have said that his "greatest mistake ever" was the company losing on the Android opportunity which has cost Microsoft nearly $400 billion and made Google the real winner.
In an interview during an event hosted by venture capital firm Village Global, Gates revealed that the mistake was to allow Google to develop Android and not creating a profitable model themselves, reports TechCrunch.
"In the software world, particularly for platforms, these are winner-take-all markets. So the greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is. That is, Android is the standard non-Apple phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win," Gates told Eventbrite co-founder and CEO Julia Hartz.
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"If you're there with half as many apps or 90 per cent as many apps, you're on your way to complete doom. There's room for exactly one non-Apple operating system and what's that worth? $400 billion that would be transferred from company G (Google) to company M (Microsoft)," he emphasized.