Bill Gates could have beaten the Sony Reader to the market by eight years if he would have listened to his hardware and software developers in 1998 and moved forward with a prototype device built by a core team of Microsoft enginners.
In a new Vanity Fair article chronicling the “downfall” of Microsoft and do to reach store shelves on July 10, a former programmer involved with the E-Reader program says of Bill Gates decision:
“He didn’t like the user interface, because it didn’t look like Windows.”
The program was eventually scraped and the team responsible for developing the platform moved over to manage MS Office software. Ex-employee Steve Stone says Bill Gates was only focused on squeezing money out of Microsoft’s customers and that he didn’t care about creating useful products for consumers. According to Stone the main goal was to make as much money as possible based off MS Office use.
A different employee disagrees with Steve Stone’s assessment of the program, arguing instead that Bill Gates did not appreciate the devices touchscreen technology. At the time all Microsoft products were optimized for mouse and keyboard use and Bill Gates apparently felt that moving away from its core setup would ultimately hurt Microsoft sales.
Fast forward to the present day and Microsoft sales are indeed hurting but it is because the company failed to implement touchscreen based devices fast enough.
In another revelation a former MSN Messenger programmer revealed that Bill Gates veto’d plans for “status updates” because “he didn’t get it.” While a simple status update feature likely wouldn’t have stopped Facebook from growing so quickly it may have given users a more “in-touch” reason to continue using MSN Messenger.
