Steve Jobs and Bill Gates seemed irreconcilable enemies. They were actually great allies: “We worked well together”

In the field of technology, times of A fierce rivalry between large companies to master a certain market: Intel and AMD, Sony and Nintendo, Nvidia and AMD or, of course, Apple and Microsoftwith Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as representatives of that rivalry.

However, beyond that business competitiveness to achieve The best products of the market with PC or Mac: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs cultivated a relationship of “intimate enemies” based on mutual respect and recognition.

Complementary adversaries

Microsoft and Apple’s story has been marked by rivalrybut on many occasions, both companies have collaborated hand in hand to develop products. However, despite those collaborations that, for example, took Office to the Macintosh, has maintained the image of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as eternal irreconcilable rivals. Nothing is further from reality.

In An interview For the podcast ON PURPOUS From Jay Shetty, Bill Gates confessed that Jobs and he were complementary, and that allowed them to work together on different projects.

“I had a fantastic relationship with Steve. At first I worked with Jobs and Wozniak with Basic for Apple 2, and later, as Steve had a small group inside Apple developing the Macintoshinvited Microsoft to make some software applications for him. We work very closely in that project. We loved both of the result and ended up being a key product for Apple, “Gates explained.

The founder of Microsoft stressed that “although we were very competitive, we also admired each other.” Apparently, Steve Jobs thought the same as Bill Gates.

In one historical interview in which journalists of The Wall Street Journal Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg sat on both on the stage of conference D5, Steve Jobs claimed citing the song Two of the Beatles: “‘You and I have longer memories than the path that extends ahead’ and that is clearly true in this case.”

Gates assured that the secret of the long relationship of love/hate between Apple’s co -founder and he was that both were complementary. “We worked well together. He was very good in what I was not,” said the millionaire.

Without Apple and Microsoft the computer science would be different

The visions of how a Microsoft and Apple computer should be They were very differentand a faithful reflection of the strengths of their two leaders. While Apple put all the focus on design and efficiency, in Microsoft they focused on developing a platform for their software with the aim of taking a computer to each house.

“They said we were out of reality, but we knew that computer science would be part of everyday life,” Gates recalled in his interview. “Steve had incredible skills. He appreciated the user design and interface and even for his intuition with people. It was simply a genius in a way that I cannot explain. I did not look at the code or write it. Instead, the programming is mine. Let’s make that faster and more efficient code.”

This rivalry and concept differences caused computer science to advance to the mature industry that is currently, with two companies reaching capitalizations that range The 3 billion dollars. This success would probably have been impossible Without the incentive of the competition which was lived in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Microsoft’s co -founder millionaire recognized that both had speeches about how computers would change education and improve it, although he also acknowledged that projects to improve the use of computers They were not always successful.

“I think we were both satisfied with what we had done. We got a seat in the front row and helped build all this,” Gates said in reference to the last conversations he had with Steve Jobs before his death in 2011.

In the joint intervention that both founders made in 2007, Steve Jobs defined how he saw the competition between Apple and Microsoft of the late 90s: “Many people believed that the rivalry between Apple and Microsoft was a zero -sum game in which for Apple Microsoft won had to lose. It was clear that it was not necessary to play that game because Apple was not going to beat Microsoft. Microsoft.

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Image | Flickr (Joi Ito, Kazuhiro Shiozawa)