Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates reveals 'biggest mistake' he ever made

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates who remains to be the second most wealthiest man in the world, believes that the tech giant's failure in mobile was the biggest mistake he made as it was 'clearly within our skill set'. "We were clearly the company that should have achieved that, and we didn't," he said, while speaking at a forum in Washington. Gates added that Microsoft missed its chance to be the dominant firm in mobile technology because it was "distracted" during a lengthy antitrust battle with US authorities. 

He said that the company would have been more valuable if it had won the battle over operating software for mobile devices against Google and its Android platform. "We were in the field of doing operating systems for personal computers. We knew that mobile phones would be very popular," Gates said during an on-stage interview in Washington.

"We missed being the dominant mobile operating system by a very tiny amount. We were distracted during our antitrust trial. We didn't assign the best people to do the work." Gates, who moved away from day-to-day management a decade ago, said that Android is a huge asset for Google.

He also praised the Microsoft's current chief executive Satya Nadella for helping reshape the company and bring it back to the being the world's most valuable company with a market capitalization of over $1 trillion. However, the 63-year-old believes that Microsoft and others erred in allowing Amazon to become the leading cloud computing firm though its Amazon Web Services platform.

"It is a surprise and it's a huge credit to (Amazon CEO) Jeff Bezos and his team that they got out in front and with AWS did the best cloud product," Gates said. "Today Microsoft is a strong number two... (but) there are many companies including Microsoft that should feel bad" in failing to get ahead of Amazon in the cloud.

But, the Microsoft co-founder is not disturbed by the fact that he was by Jeff Bezos as the world's wealthiest individual. Asked about being number two on the billionaires list, he quipped that "it's a sign that I haven't given my money away fast enough to drop out of the top 10."