Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have been considered ardent rivals but the recent biography of Steve Jobs presents their relationship as one filled with animosity. In a recent interview with Telegraph, Bill Gates has dispelled such a notion and said that he and Jobs had a very good relationship. According to Gates, he went to meet Jobs twice in his final days and eventually sent Jobs a letter. Gates said that there was no animosity between them and never was, and that there was rather a sense of healthy competition which both of them respected.
According to Bill Gates, in his letter he asked Jobs to be proud of his creation, “”I told Steve about how he should feel great about what he had done and the company he had built. I wrote about his kids, whom I had got to know.” Disregarding the notion that he and Jobs are rivals, Gates said that they were two innovators who had a competition amid them, “There was no peace to make. We were not at war. We made great products, and competition was always a positive thing. There was no [cause for] forgiveness.”
Gates also said that after Jobs’ demise, his wife called Gates and said that Jobs’ biography painted a very untrue picture of the relationship Jobs and Gates had. ” This biography really doesn’t paint a picture of the mutual respect you had” she said, also saying that Jobs kept Bill Gates’ letter by his bed-side until his death.
Gates asserted over and over again that taking competition for aggressive rivalry was not right. He said that the relationship between him and Jobs was that of mutual respect, “Steve was an incredible genius who contributed immensely to the field I was in. We had periods, like the early Macintosh, when we had more people working on it than they did. And then we were competitors. The personal computers I worked on had a vastly higher [market] share than Apple until really the last five or six years, where Steve’s very good work on the Mac and on iPhone and iPad did extremely well. It’s quite an achievement, and we enjoyed each [other’s work].”
Image courtesy bitmoo.
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