Cameron Wimpy

In 2007, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates sat on the same stage and were asked one question: what has the other guy contributed? Gates said he’d give a lot to have Steve’s taste. Jobs said Apple spent decades missing the one thing Microsoft was good at from day one And the rivalry everyone loved to write about? Jobs said Apple stopped needing to win it back in 1997 The conversation was at the D5 conference, hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. It was the first time in years the two had done a joint interview Jobs went first. Bill, he said, built the first software company in the industry, before anybody really knew what a software company was. He was focused on software before almost anyone else had a clue that software was what mattered Gates answered with the Apple II. In 1977, Apple bet that a computer could be a mass market machine. Then came the Macintosh, and Apple really bet the company on it. Steve builds the products he wants to use himself, Gates said, with incredible taste and elegance. When Steve went back, Apple was literally failing Their history goes back further than most people know. The original Apple II ran a BASIC that Steve Wozniak wrote by hand on paper. It was brilliant, Jobs said, except it didn’t do floating point. They kept begging Woz to add it. He never did. So Apple went to Microsoft and asked for help. Apple paid $31,000 for Microsoft’s version, and Gates flew down to spend two days getting it working Then came the Mac. At the time, Microsoft wasn’t really in the applications business. Lotus ruled it on the PC. So Microsoft bet its future on the Mac making graphical interfaces popular. Back in 1984, Gates said Microsoft expected half its revenue that year to come from Mac software. The original Mac had 128K of memory By 1997, things had flipped. Windows was everywhere and Apple was in serious trouble. Jobs said too many people inside Apple were still playing a game where, for Apple to win, Microsoft had to lose And if that was the game, Apple was going to lose His fix was to stop playing it. Apple didn’t have to beat Microsoft, he said. Apple had to remember who Apple was, because it had forgotten. So he called Bill and they patched things up. He even went further. When he came back, he gave Apple’s old machines and papers to Stanford to clear out the cobwebs. You can’t look back and say I wish I hadn’t gotten fired, he said. Let’s go invent tomorrow Their advice to founders was nearly identical. Gates said the economic value was never the excitement. Even when they wrote down a computer on every desk and in every home, they didn’t think about being a big company. Jobs said you have to love what you do, because it’s so hard that any rational person would give up. Most people who fail, he said, quit because they’re sane Then the moderators asked what each learned from the other Gates said he’d give a lot to have Steve’s taste. In Mac product reviews, he’d see a question as an engineering problem, while Jobs made the decision on a sense of people and product that even Gates couldn’t fully explain Jobs said Apple was never good at partnering, because they started out building the whole thing themselves. Microsoft learned to partner early. If Apple had had a little more of that in its DNA, he said, it would have served it extremely well He ended with a Beatles line: you and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead Most people think business is about beating the other guy The two biggest rivals in tech history spent the evening describing what they envied in each other You don’t have to beat your rival. You have to remember who you are So, Team Jobs or Team Gates? Watch the full conversation below ↓ timestamps in the first reply