Time for the most-hyped session at D: All Things Digital: The semi-historic onstage interview of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Who together make up one of the most amazing facts in the history of personal technology: They’ve been at the heart of it for more than three decades now.
First, some classic footage, including a 1983 Apple promotional parody of the Dating Game in which Gates extols the virtues of the Mac. Both men enter, along with the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Handshakes all around. Swisher asks each to talk about the other’s impact on the industry. Jobs credits Gates for founding the first software company; Gates mentions the vision shown by the Apple II and Mac, Jobs’ taste and class, and how he revived a dying company when he returned.
Jobs mentions the companies’ cofounders (Woz and Paul Allen) and all the other talented people who made their successes possible. Mossberg mentions there was Microsoft software in the Apple II–Gates and Jobs talk about Microsoft BASIC and how it helped the II.
And then Microsoft’s role in the early days of the Mac. “What people don’t remember is that Microsoft wasn’t in the applications business then,” says Jobs, pointing out that Lotus was the big app company of the day. “We made this bet that the paradigm shift would be the graphical interface, and particularly that the Mac would make that happen,” says Gates. They discuss the challenge of squeezing the original Mac system into 128KB, and bicker about whether the OS itself took up 14KB or around 20KB.
“Bill and his team did some great work,” says Jobs of the early Microsoft apps for the Mac, such as the first version of Excel. Next, discussion of why Microsoft deemphasized Mac activity–Gates says that during Jobs’s exile, Apple lost its lead in graphical interfaces. Gates says he’d been talking to former Apple CEO Gil Amelio when Jobs returned; the mere mention of Amelio’s job prompts snickers from the audience.
“Gil had a saying,” says Jobs. “Apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom, and my job is to get it pointed in the right direction.” Major yuks form the audience. Mossberg says he doesn’t want to get into the whole story of Jobs’s return. “Thank you,” says Steve.
They discuss the Apple-Microsoft detente that was achieved after Jobs returned to the company. Jobs says there was no benefit to the company squabbling. “There were too many people in the Apple ecosystem playing a game of, ‘For Apple to win, Microsoft must lose,’” says Jobs. “To me, it was essential to break that paradigm.”
Source: PC World