Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Steve Jobs & Bill Gates



Microsoft News » Bill Gates Response To Steve Jobs On Windows Rip-Off Claim

...when Steve Jobs came to know that Bill Gates at Microsoft is developing a competing OS and Bill Gates visits Apple’s campus to talk with Steve as per his request.

Their meeting was in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him. Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. “You’re ripping us off!” he shouted. “I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!” Gates just sat there coolly, looking Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice, what became a classic zinger. “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”


While concept of "GUI" was introduced by Xerox PARC in form of X-windows,
implementation in Apple Mac and Microsoft Windows are very different...
Original X-Windows is much better concept, but would not work on low-end computers.
Apple made it work, and Microsoft made it cheap.

20 years later, iPhone and iPad made mobile solutions work,
and Google Android is making it "fee" (and Microsoft is making money on patents :)



Fortune Magazine: exclusive excerpt from Walter Isaacson's new book, Steve Jobs

When Steve Met Bill: 'It was a kind of weird seduction visit'