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Jobs and Gates Chat Amicably

Posted by kdawson on from the sittin'-in-a-tree dept.

circletimessquare writes "As noted, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs met at the D conference yesterday. AllThingsD has video of the entire convivial and historic meeting — check the highlights clip. When a reporter asked if their rivalry was overblown, Jobs offered up this joke: 'We've kept our marriage secret for over a decade' — to an apparently flummoxed Gates. Other tidbits: 'His mother loves him!' said Gates about PC Guy in the famous series of commercials. 'And we love them because they're all customers!' said Jobs about Microsoft employees working on Zune who use the iPod. Read more about the event, which also covered a lot of serious ground, such as Apple's iPhone, at CNN and the Times Online."

7 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. What did you expect? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Lesson: sputtering halfwitted rage is for idiot fanboys. The people who actually make things base their self-esteem on what they accomplish, not on how insanely they hate someone else.

    1. Re:What did you expect? by Admiral+Ag · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's funny you should mention this, since Gates responded to a question by saying that what he most wished he had was Jobs' sense of taste. The crowd laughed (obviously remembering that quote), but Gates told them he wasn't joking, and went on to describe Jobs' sense of product design as "magical". Basically, he admitted something we've all known for many years: Microsoft is not as good as Apple is at making cool user interfaces.

      That was pretty big of Gates. He went up in my estimation for that.

      --
      "by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
    2. Re:What did you expect? by Khuffie · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No. What he admitted was that he was not as good as Jobs at making cool user interfaces. There's a slight difference there.

  2. They don't hate each other by Bullfish · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The fanbois might wish they did but they don't. MS actually has actually helped Apple more than once. They even gave them a much needed cash infusion at one point in the 90's. And back in 83, at a meeting of my local apple users group, there was a MS shill talking up the apple and the software ms was making for it. Any bad blood is more between the basement dwellers of the world than these two. They have both contributed to the other being very rich. There are other examples, but the apple/ms rivalry is more of a media/fanboi concoction

  3. Skip the highlight reel by Nymz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The interview is not as fanboy biased as the /. summary implies. Watching the entire interview is worth it, and entertaining, and you'll be able to see why these two are still such great leaders.

  4. Why would they care? by El_Smack · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Do they really dislike each other? Really? Maybe they used to, back when business was shaky and they were only multi millionaires. But now? They both won.
    Both Apple and MS could go bankrupt tomorrow and Gates/Jobs would still have more money that they could ever spend. It's easy to be magnanimous when you are untouchable.

    --


    There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
  5. Re:Cryptic Comments by vought · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ". . . isn't it funny, a ship that leaks from the top."

    Definitively:

    This has nothing to do with Spindler's "ship with a hole in the bottom" comment. The "ship that leaks from the top" is CEOs and VPs who blab about future products to the detriment of current, shipping products while admonishing the vast majority of employees not to leak product details.

    When I joined Apple in 1995, we had to watch a security video. It schooled us about export control, "tailgating" through badged entryways, and not talking about product details with the press, friends, etc. It was silly to expect employees to keep their traps shut while they watched Diesel Spindler yak about upcoming products like the PowerBook 5300 which would have "unprecendented speed and battery life". (It didn't.)

    The ship that leaks from the top comment is simply a jibe at the days of Sculley, Spindler, and to a lesser degree, Amelio - braggadocio CEOs who represented the "old way" of doing things at Apple, and who didn't hold themselves to the same standards they expected of their employees.

      Sculley used to talk about pie-in-the-sky projects like the Knowledge Navigator, Newton, etc. well ahead of the projects actually, you know, working. Spindler was too stupid not to let stuff slip about future product direction. And Amelio talked up future products and strategies in order to keep the company relevant.