Bill Gates

Mistake: Ignored search engines

The poster kid of the computer era, Bill closed the gates of search engines right on his own face. Though he has made many breakthroughs in the computer industry, the founder of Microsoft did one big mistake by ignoring search engines. In 1998, when Google launched its lucid, fast and a search engine much faster than Microsoft’s MSN that was launched in the same year, Bill completely ignored the prospects of competition in search engine market. All this while till the launch of Bing in 2006, Microsoft was actually using the results from another readily available search engine called Inktomi. Microsoft was late in realization and Bing suffered badly in front of the Google’s brilliance.

Lesson: Considering the prowess in tech market that Microsoft had in late nineties, there is no limit to the amount of revenue that the company could have braced by materializing on search engine. But Bill Gates and team were too busy in developing other products and Google took a huge leap in the race of search engines.