Asked what they had learned from eachother over the years, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates gave revealing answers at the All Things Digital industry conference in California last week.
Gates said his instinct was to look at problems in engineering terms, but learnt that Jobs made decisions based 'on a sense of people and product'. Gates called Jobs' approach 'different' and 'magical', and said he envied Jobs' taste.
Jobs said he realised that Microsoft was better than Apple at partnering, probably because of the genesis of both companies with Apple making a whole product from day one, while Microsoft's most significant early product was part of an IBM product, which required partnering right from the start. Jobs said it took Apple 'decades' to learn how important partnering could be.
Leave a comment