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.”

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bel8 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Classic Steve Jobs. Ungrateful and rude.

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peebee67 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes. They actually made similar observations about each other, in that Bill is observing that Steve has a genius for marketing and picking clever people, as opposed to any particular knack for innovation or inventiveness of his own. But Bill is so much more gracious about how he says it and doesn't take anything away from Steve. He's genuinely impressed at how Steve has managed to somehow wrangle a seemingly impossible licensing deal from a famously obstinate cartel of rent-seekers.

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tonyedgecombe 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And mostly correct.

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hoKayDo 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Given his similar life experience Jobs could smell his own.

Woz and an endless stream of actual engineers developed Apple hardware.

Steve just focused on minutiae and details he cared about. He could not engineer his way out of a wet paper sack he would be too stuck on the color of the sack.

Always the bike shedder, never the painter.

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moscoe 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And the engineers likely had no taste or vision. Takes both types to make something great. Steve could synergize and extract greatness from teams of individuals. On their own, they would have just tooled around and not produced anything substantial.

	▲	argee 17 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I feel like at least some of Steve’s later personality has to have been influenced by interactions such as the one with Bill Atkinson, where he was told rounded corners were "incredibly difficult" to program, only to come up with an implementation a mere 24 hours later. A lifetime of such interactions, such as the one with Larry Kenyon, might have taught him that people aren’t going to do anything (unless he really really insists) and consistently lie to him.
	▲	altmanaltman 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		What is the basis of assuming "they would have just tooled around and not produced anything substanial"? Seems like something Jobs would like you to think but come on, Apple has been a massive company for every long, there is an army of people working on "vision" not Jobs just connecting to the cosmos and figuring out everything like an oracle. There is the man and then there is the hype, and i think most fall for the hype over the man.
	▲	hoKayDo 18 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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Grombobulous 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Microsoft could use someone like that, though.

You don’t need an engineer to be the CEO of the company. The company has hundreds or thousands of engineers already.

The CEO’s job isn’t to make things, it’s to make decisions - and often it’s helpful for that person to have a strong sense of taste.

I’m reminded of this interview with Rick Rubin: https://blockbuster.thoughtleader.school/p/rick-rubin-i-have...

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dilyevsky 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why didn’t those amazing engineers develop great hardware before or after jobs?

	▲	fragmede an hour ago \| parent [-]
		To be fair, the Apple Vision Pro is absolutely amazing hardware. It may not quite have found product market fit, but the hardware itself is something else.

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JumpinJack_Cash 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And yet the unimaginative had to bail out the design genius and best salesperson on the planet.

Plus I really don't think the whole Design thing was ever true to begin with tbh.

Apple has never beat Microsoft in a clear head 2 head design battle , Microsoft was either not interested in what Apple was doing or had to simply ignore it in order to avoid being broken up by the Government.

On the other hand Microsoft mopped the floor with Apple on the GUI design battlefield

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jleyank 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Erm, what's the good/great GUI aspects that MS delivered? Apple extended/stole from Xerox - who did MS steal from other than Apple?

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JumpinJack_Cash 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Windows 95 has changed everything and it was a Microsoft product, not Apple's.

He said, she said about stealing ideas etc I don't care about it.

The first rule in this game that forcefully push into 14 year old wanna be entrepreneurs is that ideas aren't worth anything.

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jleyank 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Perhaps for pc’s but evolution within a single product family is to be expected. The minicomputer and workstation world had windows years before the micros did. And the research from bell labs and xerox and mit preceded that.

	▲	JumpinJack_Cash an hour ago \| parent [-]
		We are consumers, we don't give a damn about research. The company which signs off the global adoption gets all the marbles it's the doctrine and it's accepted by everybody in the history of American industry excet for Microsoft that somehow cheated its way there or it doesn't count because Steve Jobs says so is ridiculous honestly. Revisionism at its best