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Gates and Jobs to Share A Stage

Posted by Zonk on from the no-not-celebrity-death-match dept.

Rob wrote with a link to a Computer Business Review online article, which reports that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and Apple chief Steve Jobs will make a joint appearance at a future technologies conference in Carlsbad, California. The event is expected to last a little more than an hour, and the two computer industry magnates are expected to reflect on their pasts - while theorizing on the future. "[WSJ Tech columnist] Walt Mossberg, a co-producer of the conference who will interview the execs on-stage along with colleague Kara Swisher, said they simply invited Gates and Jobs to do the interview ... [Mossberg] declined to give any color about the questions he and Swisher are preparing, or any additional information. Most likely, Gates and Jobs will use the occasion to do some friendly sparring on their polar-opposite philosophies on personal computing. Jobs may bang on about the benefits of a software-hardware approach, while Gates may rattle off the joys of partnering with hardware partners."

2 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Not what they say... by paintswithcolour · · Score: 3, Interesting
    What will be interesting is how they come across, Gates has always struck me as lacking heavily in charisma; which just happens to be Jobs strong point. In fact, I'm suprised that Microsoft shuffle Gates out quite so much, apart from being a very notable computing figure he never seems to be a good promoter of tech.; partly because he brings out resentment in many people and partly because he sums up the typical mainstream concept of 'Geekness' and all the ideas of inaccessability that conjures up...

    Jobs on the other hand is gives off (regardless of if it is true or not) a degree of approachability and dramatic flair (but, some would argue, at a hinderence of reality and pesky fact).

    So I'm not going to be too interested in what they say, but how they say, and most interestingly of all how they play it against each other. Although I can't shake the feeling that they will be slapping each other on the back....

  2. The more things change... by withoutfeathers · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Almost 25 years ago I was working as a programmer/analyst at Aetna Life & Casualty in Hartford CT. The company brought in Gates and Jobs for a one day seminar/meet-and-greet to help decide how seriously we should take the personal/desktop computer revolution. AL&C was at the time, of course, heavily into mainframe computing and barely looking at workgroup computing (System/38) let along personal computing.

    The two gentlemen were cordial, but not particularly friendly toward each other and clearly had different visions of the future of corporate computing. Now here's the punchline: The big debate between the two was over the viability of COBOL. Jobs passionately prevailed on AL&C to drop the use of COBOL altogether (money quote: "Aetna is just about the only place left in the world that still uses COBOL, everyone else has migrated to C") while Gates was just as passionately (albeit not as charismatically) espousing the virtue of moving COBOL off of mainframes and on to the desktop.

    Not a word from either of them about GUI or operating systems. Jobs was all about "new programming paradigms" and Gates was all about "the craft of programming" and how the broad range of Microsoft programming languages on PCs would accomodate that model. Gates was even promoting the idea that each programmer would have a wide range of programming languages at hand, using each one as appropriate for the task at hand like tools on a workbench. Of course, at the time, Microsoft's bread and butter was programming languages.

    My, how times have changed!