Bill Gates and Steve Jobs re-meeted historically at 20:26 on Friday, June 1st, 2007. Two legends in the technology industry—Microsoft’s director Bill Gates and Apple’s CEO—historically joined together to attend the “D: sheer digitalization” activity hosted by the Wall Street Daily. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs first greeted each other and complimented each other for their big contribution for the development. Joys said, “Bill built the first software company in the industry, and he was earlier than anyone else to recognize the importance of software.” And Bill appreciated Steve for his courage of taking the risks to exploit unbelievable fashion products. “What Steve’s done is quite phenomenal.”
The two technological giants at the same time accepted the 90-minute interview given by the columnist of Wall Street Daily Walt Mossberg and the technological reporter Kara Swisher. In this interview, Bill and Steve retrospect to their early cooperation in the 70th of last century, and showed their own views on the present and future technology formation. When asked by Swisher whether there is any misunderstanding between them, Steve joked, ‘We (Gates and I ) married 10 years ago, and this secret has been kept up to now.’ Bill added, ‘Generally speaking, we don’t complain about each other.’
In 1970s, Software once added floating-point calculating function to Apple Ⅱ BASIC. Steve said, ‘my partner Steve Wozniak writes the BASIC, which is like the best BASIC on the planet. It’s perfect in every way, except for one thing, which is just fixed-point and it’s not floating-point. We’re begging Woz to make this floating-point but he just never does it. He wrote it on a paper but never got around to make this point. Microsoft had the very popular, really good, floating-point BASIC so we ended up going to them and saying ‘help.’”
Bill added, “Through selling floating BASIC to Apple, we got 31,000 dollars. I flew out to Apple and get the cassette until the cassette normally worked.” After Apple’s Mac came to market, Microsoft once betted crazily on this new computer, on which Bill and Steve reached an agreement. Steve said, “At that time, Microsoft hadn’t carry out application service. It’s not easy for me to recall this.”
Gates said, “The reason why we appreciated Mac at that time is that we believed the graphical interfaces would finally become the mainstream, which will be led by Mac. This is not a competition between Mac and Windows, but a competition between character model and graphical interfaces.” Meanwhile, he stated that Microsoft was paid back when PC processor entered the age of 386 Model.
In spite of their standing as outstanding leaders in the global technology industry, Steve and Bill have no commons. They have different opinions on many big issues about the prospect of the technology industry. This is why the meeting of Steve and Bill has aroused so much concern from media and insiders. Despite of the cooperation between the two companies since 1970s and the fact that Microsoft invested Apple in 1997, they are always keeping hostile to each other.
Bill quitted Harvard University in 1975, and built the No.1 software company Microsoft with Paul Allen. In 1976, Steve Jobs built Apple in a garage with Steve Wozniak, accessing PC market 5 years earlier than IBM. Due to some conflicts with the board of directors, Steve left Apple in 1985, but went back in 1997 to bring Apple back to life.