Bill Gates on Steve Jobs

lorecore

Steve Jobs on Bill Gates: “Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

gnerd00

Jobs had some vestige of the value system of Reed College in him - respect for literature, typesetting, fine arts ... which dramatically evolved into a taste for the power-money politics of Silicon Valley, distantly akin to big-business Hollywood at the time. The "Barbarians of the North of Seattle" had a frat-guy MBA wolf-of-wall-street element that actively mocked and preyed upon artists.. artists were weak and whiny entitled people.. their product was not art with a markup value, but something to be commoditized in the spreadsheet That Must Be Your Master. Bill Gates, after building a what, thirty thousand square foot house? prominantly announced that he had massive digital screens to display art, not purchasing any physical paintings or similar design pieces.. maybe it sounds distant today but at the time it was a specific statement to do that, and announce it.

Grombobulous

What Bill Gates misses here is that Jobs was one of the best salespeople on the planet. Go back and watch basically any keynotes or, my favorite, his prerecorded demo of the NeXT operating system. Jobs was also a huge music lover and had strong opinions for how he wanted to listen to music. I could imagine him in a meeting with music executives convincing them of his vision quite easily. As I recall he also was the driving force behind convincing the Beatles to put their music on digital services. I think I remember when that was an iTunes exclusive. I remember Apple convinced Cingular to relinquish a lot of carrier control over to Apple for the original iPhone, as another example.

wmf

A related story about iTunes negotiations: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/jim-gian...