What Bill Gates misses here is that Jobs was one of the best salespeople on the planet. Go back and watch basically any keynotes or, my favorite, his prerecorded demo of the NeXT operating system.
Jobs was also a huge music lover and had strong opinions for how he wanted to listen to music.
I could imagine him in a meeting with music executives convincing them of his vision quite easily.
As I recall he also was the driving force behind convincing the Beatles to put their music on digital services. I think I remember when that was an iTunes exclusive.
I remember Apple convinced Cingular to relinquish a lot of carrier control over to Apple for the original iPhone, as another example.
That's true, but the 'high-order bit' in the music industry deals, back when Gates wrote this message, was that Apple had a comparatively dinky user base.
So for a record company to ink a deal with Apple was lower risk than with Microsoft.
Sometimes American fast food chains roll out a trial product in an isolated region, like a Canadian province. In 2003, offering music downloads to Apple users was a bit like testing a 'Baconator' burger with residents of Quebec.
Steve Jobs on Bill Gates: “Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”
Yes. They actually made similar observations about each other, in that Bill is observing that Steve has a genius for marketing and picking clever people, as opposed to any particular knack for innovation or inventiveness of his own. But Bill is so much more gracious about how he says it and doesn't take anything away from Steve. He's genuinely impressed at how Steve has managed to somehow wrangle a seemingly impossible licensing deal from a famously obstinate cartel of rent-seekers.
Given his similar life experience Jobs could smell his own.
Woz and an endless stream of actual engineers developed Apple hardware.
Steve just focused on minutiae and details he cared about. He could not engineer his way out of a wet paper sack he would be too stuck on the color of the sack.
And the engineers likely had no taste or vision. Takes both types to make something great. Steve could synergize and extract greatness from teams of individuals. On their own, they would have just tooled around and not produced anything substantial.
I feel like at least some of Steve’s later personality has to have been influenced by interactions such as the one with Bill Atkinson, where he was told rounded corners were "incredibly difficult" to program, only to come up with an implementation a mere 24 hours later. A lifetime of such interactions, such as the one with Larry Kenyon, might have taught him that people aren’t going to do anything (unless he really really insists) and consistently lie to him.
What is the basis of assuming "they would have just tooled around and not produced anything substanial"? Seems like something Jobs would like you to think but come on, Apple has been a massive company for every long, there is an army of people working on "vision" not Jobs just connecting to the cosmos and figuring out everything like an oracle. There is the man and then there is the hype, and i think most fall for the hype over the man.
To be fair, the Apple Vision Pro is absolutely amazing hardware. It may not quite have found product market fit, but the hardware itself is something else.
And yet the unimaginative had to bail out the design genius and best salesperson on the planet.
Plus I really don't think the whole Design thing was ever true to begin with tbh.
Apple has never beat Microsoft in a clear head 2 head design battle , Microsoft was either not interested in what Apple was doing or had to simply ignore it in order to avoid being broken up by the Government.
On the other hand Microsoft mopped the floor with Apple on the GUI design battlefield
Perhaps for pc’s but evolution within a single product family is to be expected. The minicomputer and workstation world had windows years before the micros did. And the research from bell labs and xerox and mit preceded that.
We are consumers, we don't give a damn about research.
The company which signs off the global adoption gets all the marbles
it's the doctrine and it's accepted by everybody in the history of American industry excet for Microsoft that somehow cheated its way there or it doesn't count because Steve Jobs says so is ridiculous honestly.
Jobs had some vestige of the value system of Reed College in him - respect for literature, typesetting, fine arts ... which dramatically evolved into a taste for the power-money politics of Silicon Valley, distantly akin to big-business Hollywood at the time.
The "Barbarians of the North of Seattle" had a frat-guy MBA wolf-of-wall-street element that actively mocked and preyed upon artists.. artists were weak and whiny entitled people.. their product was not art with a markup value, but something to be commoditized in the spreadsheet That Must Be Your Master. Bill Gates, after building a what, thirty thousand square foot house? prominantly announced that he had massive digital screens to display art, not purchasing any physical paintings or similar design pieces.. maybe it sounds distant today but at the time it was a specific statement to do that, and announce it.
Even as a lifelong Apple fan since the early 90s, I had never heard this POV before, but I think it's accurate. Is there a place to learn more about it?
What Bill Gates misses here is that Jobs was one of the best salespeople on the planet. Go back and watch basically any keynotes or, my favorite, his prerecorded demo of the NeXT operating system.
Jobs was also a huge music lover and had strong opinions for how he wanted to listen to music.
I could imagine him in a meeting with music executives convincing them of his vision quite easily.
As I recall he also was the driving force behind convincing the Beatles to put their music on digital services. I think I remember when that was an iTunes exclusive.
I remember Apple convinced Cingular to relinquish a lot of carrier control over to Apple for the original iPhone, as another example.
That's true, but the 'high-order bit' in the music industry deals, back when Gates wrote this message, was that Apple had a comparatively dinky user base.
So for a record company to ink a deal with Apple was lower risk than with Microsoft.
Sometimes American fast food chains roll out a trial product in an isolated region, like a Canadian province. In 2003, offering music downloads to Apple users was a bit like testing a 'Baconator' burger with residents of Quebec.
A related story about iTunes negotiations: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/jim-gian...
Steve Jobs on Bill Gates: “Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”
Classic Steve Jobs. Ungrateful and rude.
Yes. They actually made similar observations about each other, in that Bill is observing that Steve has a genius for marketing and picking clever people, as opposed to any particular knack for innovation or inventiveness of his own. But Bill is so much more gracious about how he says it and doesn't take anything away from Steve. He's genuinely impressed at how Steve has managed to somehow wrangle a seemingly impossible licensing deal from a famously obstinate cartel of rent-seekers.
And mostly correct.
Given his similar life experience Jobs could smell his own.
Woz and an endless stream of actual engineers developed Apple hardware.
Steve just focused on minutiae and details he cared about. He could not engineer his way out of a wet paper sack he would be too stuck on the color of the sack.
Always the bike shedder, never the painter.
And the engineers likely had no taste or vision. Takes both types to make something great. Steve could synergize and extract greatness from teams of individuals. On their own, they would have just tooled around and not produced anything substantial.
I feel like at least some of Steve’s later personality has to have been influenced by interactions such as the one with Bill Atkinson, where he was told rounded corners were "incredibly difficult" to program, only to come up with an implementation a mere 24 hours later. A lifetime of such interactions, such as the one with Larry Kenyon, might have taught him that people aren’t going to do anything (unless he really really insists) and consistently lie to him.
What is the basis of assuming "they would have just tooled around and not produced anything substanial"? Seems like something Jobs would like you to think but come on, Apple has been a massive company for every long, there is an army of people working on "vision" not Jobs just connecting to the cosmos and figuring out everything like an oracle. There is the man and then there is the hype, and i think most fall for the hype over the man.
[dead]
Microsoft could use someone like that, though.
You don’t need an engineer to be the CEO of the company. The company has hundreds or thousands of engineers already.
The CEO’s job isn’t to make things, it’s to make decisions - and often it’s helpful for that person to have a strong sense of taste.
I’m reminded of this interview with Rick Rubin: https://blockbuster.thoughtleader.school/p/rick-rubin-i-have...
Why didn’t those amazing engineers develop great hardware before or after jobs?
To be fair, the Apple Vision Pro is absolutely amazing hardware. It may not quite have found product market fit, but the hardware itself is something else.
And yet the unimaginative had to bail out the design genius and best salesperson on the planet.
Plus I really don't think the whole Design thing was ever true to begin with tbh.
Apple has never beat Microsoft in a clear head 2 head design battle , Microsoft was either not interested in what Apple was doing or had to simply ignore it in order to avoid being broken up by the Government.
On the other hand Microsoft mopped the floor with Apple on the GUI design battlefield
Erm, what's the good/great GUI aspects that MS delivered? Apple extended/stole from Xerox - who did MS steal from other than Apple?
Windows 95 has changed everything and it was a Microsoft product, not Apple's.
He said, she said about stealing ideas etc I don't care about it.
The first rule in this game that forcefully push into 14 year old wanna be entrepreneurs is that ideas aren't worth anything.
Perhaps for pc’s but evolution within a single product family is to be expected. The minicomputer and workstation world had windows years before the micros did. And the research from bell labs and xerox and mit preceded that.
We are consumers, we don't give a damn about research.
The company which signs off the global adoption gets all the marbles
it's the doctrine and it's accepted by everybody in the history of American industry excet for Microsoft that somehow cheated its way there or it doesn't count because Steve Jobs says so is ridiculous honestly.
Revisionism at its best
Jobs had some vestige of the value system of Reed College in him - respect for literature, typesetting, fine arts ... which dramatically evolved into a taste for the power-money politics of Silicon Valley, distantly akin to big-business Hollywood at the time.
The "Barbarians of the North of Seattle" had a frat-guy MBA wolf-of-wall-street element that actively mocked and preyed upon artists.. artists were weak and whiny entitled people.. their product was not art with a markup value, but something to be commoditized in the spreadsheet That Must Be Your Master. Bill Gates, after building a what, thirty thousand square foot house? prominantly announced that he had massive digital screens to display art, not purchasing any physical paintings or similar design pieces.. maybe it sounds distant today but at the time it was a specific statement to do that, and announce it.
Even as a lifelong Apple fan since the early 90s, I had never heard this POV before, but I think it's accurate. Is there a place to learn more about it?