London - Microsoft founder Bill Gates who rejected the touchscreen e-book gadget, could have evaded the declining state of his firm, had he adopted the gadget years ago.
Gates's engineers, who brought him an e-reader in 1998, told them to forget about the 'unimportant' device, because he thought the future lay with keyboards.
According to the Daily Mail, today most modern gadgets eschew physical keys for touchscreens, while the original Amazon Kindle, which has fuelled the e-book boom, included a keyboard.
A programmer, who was involved in Microsoft's e-reader project said that Gates also complained about the device's interface because he felt 'it didn't look like Windows', the operating system that made him his fortune.
The comments were made for an upcoming story about the 'downfall' of Microsoft, which is scheduled to hit newsstands soon.
Gates dismissed the gadget as 'unimportant', and the engineers working on it were told to come up with something else instead.
The e-book market in the UK alone is now worth an estimated 243 million pound, with digital revenues accounting for 8 per cent of all book sales last year.
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