Bill Gates: ‘I wrote Steve Jobs a letter as he was dying. He kept it by his bed’
LikesUP: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Laurene Jobs
One of the few people to understand his [Bill Gates’] compulsions was Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, who died of cancer in October 2011. The two men’s long and stormy relationship has been chronicled in Jobs’s latest biography, but, until now, Gates has said little about their divisions – and their bonds.
“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 iPhones and iPads did extremely well. It’s quite an achievement, and we enjoyed each [other’s work].”
This tribute, part praise, part reminder of Gates’s dominance, is more tactful than the comments Jobs made in his lifetime. “He spent a lot of his time competing with me. There are lots of times when Steve said [critical] things about me. If you took the more harsh examples, you could get quite a litany.” In Jobs’s view, his rival was “unimaginative”, “a bit narrow” and derivative. As he once told an interviewer, “He [Gates] would be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram.”
The atmosphere changed in 2007 when Gates left Microsoft to set up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with his wife. “Steve and I did an event together, and he couldn’t have been nicer…I got a fair bit of time with him in his last year. Some months before Jobs died, Gates paid him a long visit. “We spent literally hours reminiscing and talking about the future.” Later, with his old adversary’s death imminent, he wrote to him. “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.”
That last gesture was not, he says, conciliatory. “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.” After Jobs’s death, Gates received a phone call from his wife, Laurene. “She said; ‘Look, this biography really doesn’t paint a picture of the mutual respect you had.’ And she said he’d appreciated my letter and kept it by his bed.”
Bill Gates rarely talks in such human terms.
