Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has admitted that forcing users to press the Control-Alt-Delete key combination to log into a PC was a mistake. In an interview at a Harvard fundraising campaign, Gates described his early days at Microsoft and the Control-Alt-Delete decision. Gates explained the key combination was designed to prevent other apps from faking the login prompt and stealing a password.
“It was a mistake,” Gates admits to an audience left laughing at his honesty. “We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn’t want to give us our single button.” David Bradley, an engineer who worked on the IBM PC, invented the combination which was originally created to reboot a PC. “I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous,” Bradley said in an interview previously, leaving Bill Gates looking rather awkward. The key combination is a part of windows 8 allowing users lock a machine or access the task manager.
Control-Alt-Delete wasn’t the only thing Gates admitted to, the Microsoft chairman also confirmed that the software makers didn’t expand to the mobile market when they had the chance.
“We didn’t miss cellphones, but the way that we went about it didn’t allow us to get the leadership,” said Gates at the time, before admitting the strategy was “clearly a mistake.” Current CEO Steve Ballmer, who plans to retire shortly, has also been admitting his mistakes recently. “I regret there was a period in the early 2000s when we were so focused on what we had to do around Windows [Vista] that we weren’t able to redeploy talent to the new device called the phone,” explained Ballmer at a recent event.