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Gates and Jobs to Share A Stage
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."
I have this vision of the future Heroes episode where Peter and Syler have a showdown. Glowing hands and all.
"Jobs -- while Gates drinks a glass of water -- may bang on about the benefits of a software-hardware approach."
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Seems like a scheme to reiterate the idea that people can only choose between Mac and Windows. They are completely ignoring another big player.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Dear Mr Jobs,
Please could you ask Bill to bring along 235 software patents or shut up.
Sincerely, everybody.
M$ = Lawful Evil (we can do what we want, our lawyers will make it legal)
Mac = Neutral Evil (we're evil, if we break the law our lawyers will get us out)
M$ = 20th level necromancer
special attack = Summon Zombie pc
Mac = 20th level enchanter
special attack = Charm people into thinking a Mac will make them cool
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
1. a spoof of those pc guy/ mac guy ads with jobs and gates in the appropriate roles. it will never happen, but still
2. an icon for jobs on slashdot. gates has his borg visor one. why not jobs with an ipod?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Gates: We want you to be locked in to proprietary Microsoft products
Jobs: We want you to be locked in to proprietary Apple products
Would that be east-west poles, 'cause they seem pretty close together...
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
2 CEOs enter...
One CEO leaves.
Walt Mossberg: Bill Gates, what about a shared interview with Steve Jobs?
Billg: Sharing a stage with Steve Jobs? That's the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft.
I envision it starting like this:
...and I'm a PC
Jobs: I'm a Mac
Gates:
Let's not forget it wasn't long ago that MSFT basically ripped off apple [who rippled off PARC]
If Woz's explanation is correct, no one did any "ripping off" in this case. Apple paid for the rights to various parts of GUI from Xerox, and Microsoft traded rights to Apple II Basic in exchange for the GUI rights to make Windows.
I'm sure Apple technicians breathed a sigh of relief when they found it was going to be Gates instead of Ballmer. An anti-pie personal forcefield is much easier to build than an anti-chair personal forcefield. :P
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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!