Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates prefers Android over an iPhone, and for PCs, he still relies on Windows. Gates said this during an interview with Chris Wallace from Fox News Sunday. He did not talk about the phone he used before Android, but it seems likely that it was a Windows Phone.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates might be an Android fan simply because the Android ecosystem is more flexible than iOS. Personalities like Gates would surely not want any restrictions placed on their way of working, and Android is one OS that has gained popularity among staunch tech users.
During the interview, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates stated that even though he uses Android devices now, many Microsoft apps are installed on the device. Popular apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams are some of the apps installed on Gates’ smartphone.
When the interviewer asked, “So, no iPhone?” Gates replied, “No, no iPhone.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, however, takes a softer tone toward Apple. This was more evident when Nadella showcased Microsoft’s Outlook email system with the help of an iPhone a couple of years ago. Even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak keeps on toggling between Android devices and iPhones. Wozniak even went on to say that Apple could have partnered with Google, notes CNET.
Neither Bill Gates nor his wife Melinda looks on the iPhone favorably. In 2010, when asked about smartphones, Melinda Gates said her children asked for iPhones and she blatantly refused to buy them. She even stated that there was no Apple product in the entire Gates house.
The Windows Phone never achieved a strong footing in the smartphone market. Eventually, the thin market for the Windows-based smartphone dried up with two players, Android and Apple, ruling globally.
In a bid to gain market share, Microsoft even partnered with and then later acquired Nokia. The two companies sold the Windows-based Nokia phones under the Lumia line. However, these phones could not achieve what they were expected to. Unsuccessful attempts resulted in layoffs, and once Satya Nadella took over the helm, Microsoft sold off its Nokia business to HMD Global for $350 million in 2016. Microsoft acquired Nokia for $7.9 billion in 2013.
Bill Gates surely could not be happy about how the Windows Phone turned out, but that’s not all he regrets or is sad about regarding Windows. Gates has repeatedly stated that using the three key combination Ctrl+Alt+Del could have been avoided if Microsoft had come up with a better solution at the time it was created. Gates acknowledges the mistake in not assigning a single key for the function.
“Well, I’m not sure you can go back in life and change small things in your life without putting other things at risk,” he said about it.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates blames the IBM engineers responsible for designing the IBM PC keyboard at the time.
“The IBM PC hardware keyboard only had one way that it could get a guaranteed interrupt generated. So, clearly the people involved, they should have put another key on it to make that work,” Gates said at a recent Bloomberg Business forum.
