Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was recently interviewed by Charlie Rose for 60 Minutes, and one of the topics of discussion was the late Steve Jobs. Mr. Gates became quite emotional when thinking back to his last meeting with Mr. Jobs, and he said he wished he had Mr. Jobs's sense of design.
Bill Gates Thinking Back to His Last Meeting with Steve Jobs
When he was sick, I got to go down and spend time with him," Mr. Gates said. They talked about, "what we'd learned, families...about anything. [...] He showed me the boat he was working on, and talked about how he's looking forward to being on it, even though we both knew there was a good chance that wouldn't happen."
Charlie Rose asked Mr. Gates about missed opportunities, and he acknowledged that Microsoft had done, "tablets, lots of tablets, well before Apple did, but [Apple] put the pieces together in a way that succeeded."
60 Minutes put together a mini-video dealing predominantly with the parts of the interview that involved Steve Jobs:
Note that the video requires Flash.
The comment about Steve Jobs and his design sense came when Charlie Rose asked, "What did [Steve Jobs] have that you wished you had?"
Mr. Gates instantly and matter-of-factly replied, "Oh, his sense of design. That everything had to fit a certain aesthetic. The fact that he [Steve Jobs], with as little engineering background as he had, it shows that design can lead you in a good direction, and some phenomenal products came out of that."
Related to that question, Mr. Gates also commented on Steve Jobs's intuitive grasp of branding and marketing, saying that he understood these things in a very good ways.
The conversation also went further back in time to their early days as tech disrupters:
[Steve Jobs] and I, in a sense, grew up together. We were within a year of the same age, and we were kind of naively optimistic and built big companies. And every fantasy we had about creating products and learning new things-- we achieved all of it. And most of it as rivals. But we always retained a certain respect and communication, including even when he was sick.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were collaborators in a sense almost as much as they were rivals and competitors. In the early days of Apple, Microsoft was a partner company making software for the Apple II, and later the Mac.
After Microsoft released Windows, Steve Jobs was bitter about Microsoft ripping off his Macintosh—a bitterness that reverberated through the decades to the patent wars Apple is fighting against Android as a whole and Samsung in particular.
Steve Jobs turned to Microsoft for a loan in the late 1990s when he first came back to Apple, telling a room full of Mac developers that the platform wars were over. Of course, it was only a few years before that when Steve Jobs told Robert X. Cringely for The Triumph of the Nerds that "Microsoft has no taste."
The reality, however, is that this interview, the session that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did together at 2007's D conference (also referenced in the video above), and this interview with 60 Minutes shows that when you cut down to it, the two men were friends.
Much of the interview dealt with Bill Gates and his amazing work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 60 Minutes also provided that full interview, which we recommend. The bit about the vaccine thermos is super cool. That interview in full:
This video also requires Flash.