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.

That's true, but the 'high-order bit' in the music industry deals, back when Gates wrote this message, was that Apple had a comparatively dinky user base.

So for a record company to ink a deal with Apple was lower risk than with Microsoft.

Sometimes American fast food chains roll out a trial product in an isolated region, like a Canadian province. In 2003, offering music downloads to Apple users was a bit like testing a 'Baconator' burger with residents of Quebec.