Want to hear one of the smartest minds in tech opening his mouth and saying something eye-rollingly dumb? Check out Bill Gates telling CNBC that the iPad is being “held back” by its lack of physical keyboard and, of course, Microsoft Office.
Explaining Microsoft’s rationale for the Microsoft Surface — a device which literally commands a 0.0% global market share — Gates told CNBC that he believed that in the future, it’s going “to be harder and harder to distinguish products” that are PCs versus tablets. The Surface, he said, was therefore the PC and the tablet of the future.
Then Gates went on to be stupid about the iPad. Saying “A lot of those users are frustrated, they can’t type, they can’t create documents, they don’t have Office there.”
This is just laughably stupid. Six months after its debut, the Microsoft Surface has 0.0% market share. I wanted to repeat that so you didn’t think it’s a typo. 0.0%. Surely, that number would be a little bit higher if “a lot of” people actually wanted what the Surface offered, which is a tablet with a physical keyboard that can run Microsoft Office.
Of course, this is also the man who once said the iPad would fail because it had no stylus. Who’s laughing now?
Bill Gates starts talking about the Surface at the 7:20 market in the video below:
Source: Business Insider
