Bill Gates has suggested if it wasn’t for the costly and prolonged antitrust lawsuit in 1998, Microsoft would be the dominant player in the mobile OS world not Google.

This lawsuit, which lasted roughly three years, proved to undermine the Microsoft dominance on the technology world. With the playing-field levelled for competition, Microsoft gradually fell back into the chasing peloton, though founder Bill Gates suggested there was a much bigger impact for the business.

“There’s no doubt that the antitrust lawsuit was bad for Microsoft, and we would have been more focused on creating the phone operating system,” said Gates at the DealBook Conference in New York. “Instead of using Android today, you would be using Windows Mobile.

“We were so close. I was just too distracted that I screwed that up because of the distraction. We were just three months too late with the release that Motorola would have used on a phone. It’s a winner take all matter for sure, now no-body here has ever heard of Windows Mobile, but oh well.”

Some might dismiss Gates’ proclamation, the OS did launch after all and was not in the same league as Android, though it is an interesting idea.

If Microsoft had not been spending so much time defending its PC software business, more attention and investment could have been directed to the mobile OS. The transition from home computer to the smartphone was after all one of the contributing factors to Microsoft’s decline from power.

Interestingly enough, Gates also claims that if he hadn’t had to defend the business in such an intense antitrust case, he wouldn’t have retired so early.

While Microsoft is now recapturing its dominant position, thanks to a focus on the cloud computing segment, it spent years lurking in the shadows as an also-ran in the technology segment. This was still a very profitable company, but it had fallen from the dizzy heights of the 80s and 90s. The world moved from the home computer to mobile, and Microsoft was slow to react.

On the other side of the equation, Google acquired Android and entered the mobile world. This is perhaps one of the smartest bits of business ever, as Google reportedly acquired Android for as little as $50 million. Without this OS, Google would not have dominated the mobile world and would not be anywhere near as profitable as it is today.

Gates might be exaggerating with his claims here, though the world certainly look a lot different if Microsoft had won the mobile OS race.