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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.
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
I envision it starting like this:
...and I'm a PC
Jobs: I'm a Mac
Gates:
While you have a bit of a point, I don't think Linus is the right choice. I don't want to downplay his contribution or anything, but he's more of a programmer and more specifically a kernel hacker. Jobs and Gates are the businessmen who run the companies and oversee the product vision.
So Linus, the head Mac kernel guy, and the head Vista kernel guy might be interesting. Shuttleworth might be a better guy to line up with Jobs and Gates.
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!