(Bill Vs Steve) 
Who deserves a **higher **rating as a visionary? Why?
By sheer numbers alone, probably Bill Gates.
They’ve both been first to market with probably zero original ideas so market share is a fair enough measure.
I choose Gates, for one simple reason. He is accommodating. Jobs has to do it “his way”. The first thing that Jobs did when he returned to Apple around 1995 was cancel the contracts that Apple had signed to license the Mac OS. People had put a lot of work into that in good faith. Gates was willing to work basically with anyone (including Jobs, who to be fair, also accommodates Gates). He will sell his OS to anyone.
Jobs is a genius marketer, while Gates is the real visionary. Incidentally, let me not fail to mention Woz, who is a genius engineer.
And they all run rings around Larry Ellison. And don’t let me get started on SUN.
Well then Jobs has got Gates thoroughly trounced on market share of mp3 players, smart phones and tablet computers, right? After all, Macs are only 33% of Apple’s sales and most of that revenue is from their hardware.
As a visionary, Jobs has this one all over Gates. If we go just by computers, Apple has led the way in almost every advance in the last 25 years. And he’s got Pixar as his ace in the hole.
Sure, Gates markets his OS more successfully, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Thing is MS is primarily a software company, they don’t make computers.
Start factoring in things like sales for MS office, Server OS’s and applications.
There is a metric shitload of MS products that many people never see because they dont need SQL Server, or server cluster management.
How would it be visionary to continue contracts that sold away the most marketable assets of the company at pennies on the dollar to people who were not expanding the market but only cannibalizing it, contrary to the whole purpose behind those agreements in the first place?
So you think it would be visionary to continue the downward financial turn of the company instead of what Jobs actually did, which was take a company with $12 shares to where it’s now $300 a share after more than one stock split?
Thank goodness you’re not in charge of a corporation.
So switch my reference to “OS” to “software” instead. Doesn’t change the conclusion.
Gates.
For those particular hardware items yes, but overall he is still a way behind, and Jobs merely put out his own versions of the above. nothing particularly revolutionary about them.
They are nice versions, don’t get me wrong, but they don’t add up to the total of Gate’s achievements.
Achievement ≠ Vision.
Bill Gates biggest vision was selling MS-DOS to IBM. It’s all been downhill from there.
The MP3 player, PDA, and phone industries have spent the past 4-6 years trying to copy what Jobs did with the iPod and iPhone. Now they are following suit with the iPad. The iPod (and iTunes Store) changed the MP3 player industry forever. The iPhone changed the PDA and smartphone industry forever. That’s visionary.
You don’t find people following Microsoft around trying to clone their products. Usually Microsoft is the one copying someone else’s innovation. What new, visionary products has Microsoft released in the past 15 years? Nearly everything they do is a reaction to a product released by someone else.
Have you ever read anything that Gates has written? He’s been wrong about the future direction of the technology industry almost perpetually for the past 15 years. Hardly visionary.
Visionary does not necessarily mean the most innovative - Apple did not invent the MP3 player, or the smartphone, or the GUI, or the tablet computer. Nor does it mean the most successful. But Jobs and Apple are uniquely good at seeing the potential for improvement in existing technologies, and how to turn them into products that people will actually want to buy before people even know they want them. That sounds visionary to me.
Hmmmmm, I think we are maybe bouncing around between definitions of what a visionary actually is. And I’m confounding achievement, market share, innovation etc. etc.
If I think about who I really consider to a visionary, I’m drawn to someone like Alan Turing, and neither Gates nor Jobs approaches his genius.
Gates. Without Gates jobs wouldnt have even thought of his stuff. Plus Gates wants a space elevator 
It’s really apples (pardon the pun) vs. oranges, because they originally had two different visions.
Jobs wanted to build the perfect home computer that would do everything you wanted it to, and look and feel good doing it. Gates didn’t much care about look or feel – he wanted to develop the one perfect piece of software that could pretty much power any platform.
The Apple II models weren’t that great an improvement over their competition. The IIc looked good, but turned out to be relatively limited in its capabilities. The IIe was more useful, but a rather ordinary style. The early Mac models were constantly criticized for always needing something extra (a bigger monitor, a second disk drive, etc.)
By contrast, MS-DOS was pretty revolutionary from the get go. However, Gates & Co. were always behind the curve in developing applications that could actually use DOS to its full extent.
It’s sort of like the development of skyscrapers. You needed someone like Louis Sullivan to come up with a vision for what a tall building should be. But you also needed Elisha Otis to come up with an elevator design that worked.
Gates is the late 20th century’s Henry Ford and John Rockefeller all rolled into one.
Ford changed the way human societies operate. Ford didn’t invent the car, but he essentially pioneered automated mass production of automobiles. This had an enormous impact obviously in the automotive industry. That by itself changed society in a profound way. However, Ford’s effects go further than that, because his assembly line process was widely copied and emulated in virtually all other major manufacturing industries. Ford actually freely shared his methods with the world, as well.
That’s what Gates did with computing, and most particularly with software. What I mean by that is Gates recognized a means of bringing personal computing mainstream. The PC wasn’t invented in the 1990s and certainly not the 1980s, but only extreme hobbyists owned personal machines in the 70s. Most “real” work was done on mainframes. Gates saw that the future could be in personal computing, he was one of many who saw that.
Where Gates became a visionary is he saw that you could write software that could run on any machine whose manufacturer didn’t intentionally prevent it, and create sort of a universal interface for computers. At the end of the 1990s anyone using a non-Microsoft OS was in the same camp as the people who were using personal computers and mainframes in the 70s (niche users or highly technical users using beefy machines that had way different use cases than a consumer or business end-user.)
If you contrast this with Jobs, you see how Gates got it and Jobs quite honestly didn’t. Jobs thought it was all about the integrated machine, you ship a machine that you design and with software you write. It’s vertical integration and you have total control of the product and it’s great. Well, the market didn’t favor that at all for personal computers.
Personal computers dramatically changed the world in real, meaningful ways. iPods changed the world in the same way that the walkman or the cassette disc itself did, it wasn’t insignificant but we’re not talking massive societal changes with dramatic effects in all fields of life.
The smartphone is probably more analogous to something that has had society-wide changes, but Jobs didn’t corner smartphones like Gates did PCs. Smartphones actually weren’t invented with the iPhone, and it’s hard to argue they weren’t popular before the iPhone. Nokia had a pretty decent lineup of phones that were popular in Europe, BlackBerry had been out for awhile. Was the iPhone the first generation focusing on things like third-party applications and browsing of the full fledged internet? Sure, and that was a big change. Smartphones are a big deal but Jobs just hasn’t had the impact on that market that Gates did on PCs.
Obviously since about 2003-4 Apple has really kicked everyone’s ass, and they’re a household name in consumer electronics. However, to me there is a big difference between someone who is able to sell cool gadgets better than anyone else in the world and someone whose approach to operating system software quite honestly is the reason so many people are using computers today.
At the beginning of my thread I mentioned that Gates is a combination of Henry Ford and Rockefeller. I mentioned why he’s akin to Henry Ford, but he’s similar to Rockefeller in another way. Rockefeller lived to be almost 100 years old, during the first half of his life he amassed easily the greatest personal fortune in modern times and potentially in all of human history. During the second half of his life Rockefeller essentially rewrote the book on philanthropy, and some of that lives on to this very day in the form of not just the Rockefeller Foundation but also the whole philanthropic sphere which for generations after his death have followed in his foot steps.
Gates has been just as much if not more of a revolutionary in philanthropy than he has been in business. For all the lauding I did of Gates already, a lot of people were walking the same path as him, and it’s not impossible someone else would have been able to create a universal OS. However, there are no indications anyone else would have made the major strides in philanthropy that Gates has. It’s really not about the sheer amount of money Gates has and will give away, but how he has done it. Gates has also been extremely successful in getting other super-wealthy individuals to pledge the vast majority of their personal fortunes to philanthropy.
I’m sure guys like Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison have probably given away a ton of money to charity, but their giving is more in the traditional model of noblesse oblige where a super rich guy just throws a bunch of gold coins at a crowd of beggars. Gates has really taken an approach in which his giving will have profound effects on the less fortunate for generations after he is dead.
People easily forget what an enormous deal Windows 95 was. It did more to bring personal computers to the masses than anything Jobs has ever touched.
But really, if I have to pick, I’m going with Thomas J. Watson, Jr.
I think something to keep in mind it isn’t a question of Apple vs. Microsoft, which company makes shit you like more.
I’ve owned a few Fords in my time, long ago. I’ve liked every Toyota I’ve ever bought more than any of the Fords I’ve owned. I’ve also never gone wrong with a Volvo or a Subaru.
But that’s irrelevant, it’s not about iPod vs. Zune or Mac vs PC or iPhone vs Windows Phone 7 (lol) or whether Mac OSX is a cooler OS than Windows.
Windows changed the world, and not just the consumer electronics market, but the whole world. Mechanics have Windows PCs in their shops now, guys who run construction companies are probably running Windows PCs.
Why do you think MS-DOS was revolutionary?
Jobs isn’t a visionary. He markets stuff. Gates saw the true value of computes was in the OS and not in a particular product. He let others make the hardware and concentrated on putting Windows in every home.
Jobs wanted to control everything. Apple’s iPod is an example of marketing a device. There were lots of mp3 players and other small devices, but the iPod was the success due to it’s marketing.
Neither is actually a real visionary in terms of the word. Both used only small close in circles and now that both are rich, they employ the same stale fat-cat corp traps in the non-profit sides.