Gates Vs Jobs

In My Humble Opinion
21

I’m shocked to see anyone extolling Gates as a visionary. A great CEO and businessman maybe, but visionary? No, I don’t see that.

PCs - The vision was IBM’s and even DOS was a rip off of Tim Paterson’s QDOS. No vision or innovation there.
Windows - This was a rip off of not only Mac but the various other graphical interfaces such as Amiga and X-Windows.
Office - Word was ripped off from WordPerfect, Excel from Lotus 123, Powerpoint was purchased from Forethought, Visio was also purchased, Exchange/Outlook was based off of code from AT&T. Not seeing any vision there… aside from that of any smart businessman.
Internet Explorer - A ripoff of Netscape/Mozilla.
X-Box - A fine platform. But there isn’t a single thing the X-box line has done that it’s competitors weren’t doing.

I can’t think of a single original idea that came from Bill Gates. Gates was a genius of adapting and taking ownership of other peoples’ vision. But he was never a visionary himself.

22

Why can’t a “CEO and businessman” be visionary? :confused:

Gates vision was clearly defined by the Microsoft creed for a computer in every home. He achieved that through the use of software meant for the masses, focusing on a platform that eventually grew to be the most used system on the planet. He did not do this by accident, it was not just something that happened, it was his vision to do this, and he executed flawlessly.

Jobs is visionary too. He was the first one with a true computer for the masses, he has changed the cell phone (iPhone, music(iPod), and computing(iPad) industries in the past decade, and as mentioned funded Pixar. Jobs, however, can be his own worst enemy and he’s made mistakes over the course of his career that Gates avoided. For starters, Gates never lost control of his company until he was ready to give it up.

Anyway, while owning a movie studio might be cool I’d still rather be the guy who, more than anyone, brought computing to the world.

This is a much closer debate than it would have been 10 years ago, and I think the true answer is “It’s too early to tell.” If Jobs’ vision of smartphones+apps becomes the dominant computing platform for 25+ years running, he probably would win this race pretty handily. But for now… it’s Gates.

23

Tim Paterson retired from Microsoft a multi-millionaire. Not bad for a hacker who sold to MS what essentially was a legally-shaky CP/M ripoff.

24

Again, I don’t think this is anything other than an adaptation of previous linux software installation. Lots of users working to offer applications that people can easily install.
Jobs is the master of making it pretty and easy but it isn’t visionary or revolutionary.

25

Xbox Live says hello.

ETA: On top of that, the 360 and the Wii are really driving this generation of gaming systems. Nearly everything Sony does with their PS3 is a reaction to something Microsoft or Nintendo did years before. Xbox 360 Achievements begat PS3 Trophies. Wii motion controls begat the PlayStation Move (at least Kinect is different in some way). Xbox Live begat the PlayStation Network.

It’s almost possible to say their video game division has been the most innovative part of the company for years.

26

This is what I came in here to point out. There are certainly endless Internet arguments to be made contrasting and comparing Gates and Jobs (and others) but the mark of vision is that Gates saw beyond the accumulation of wealth and power and he saw how to take the next step beyond that. He changed the world (with others) on the personal computing side, yes. But now, following that achievement, he is changing the world again by using his wealth and influence, and the wealth and influence of others, to alter the world for the better. That’s a vision that hasn’t been seen in the others. Any of them (Jobs, Allen, Buffet, Lucas and so forth) could have taken lead on this…but it was Gates and his wife who did so.

More people will live better lives in the developed world through the technological vision.

But more people in the developing world will actually LIVE through the humanitarian vision.

That’s not something to be either ignored or despised.

27

I don’t think it’s either/or - the point is that it is both/and.

  • Gates’s / MS business model is platform/layer based: MS’s initial business model was focused on defining and owning product categories that are essential as part of larger assets (e.g., an OS that’s part of a PC)

  • Jobs’ / Apple’s business model has been focused on maximizing value by controlling as much of the entire system as possible

What is interesting is that both companies have gained prominance in industry sectors that lend themselves to those approaches.

28

It’s funny, technical people think that making something work for the first time is revolutionary, and that being able to invent new technologies is visionary.

Business people think that making something popular and widely used is revolutionary, and being able to see revolutions on the horizon before they occur is visionary.

I shared the “technical” viewpoint until sometime around my junior year at MIT.

Using either definition, Gates may have been a visionary back in the 1980’s. I wasn’t around then, and don’t know enough to have an opinion. He certainly hasn’t been a visionary since then. Jobs has been a visionary using the second definition at least three times - Pixar, the iPod, and the iPhone.

29

As has been pointed out in this very thread, Windows 95 and Xbox Live (at the very minimum) knock this argument out of the water.

30

The difference between Gates and all his competitors is he saw that you could write software that could run on any system. IBM was writing software to run on its own mainframes, and when personal computing started to pick up IBM started porting some of the old mainframe functionality into equivalent desktop applications. Don’t forget companies like Xerox and etc were writing operating system software too, they didn’t see the real value of it. Apple didn’t see the real value of it, they arguably came closest, though. Jobs realized if you could create a friendly user interface that Average Joe could use, you’d be able to turn personal computers into something that sat in almost every home. Where Jobs ran off the rails is he thought that meant making all those computers, Gates realized all you needed was to make the software that ran on those computers.

There are a lot of automakers whose names only die-hard historians know, not because they made inferior cars to Henry Ford but because they lacked his comprehensive vision of the mass production and mass distribution. They were just playing for a different end game, the wrong end game.

31

The PC market was experiencing explosive growth in the 80’s, well before Win95.

In addition, there were 2 primary events that kicked the PC market into high gear and neither of them were driven by Microsoft:

  1. IBM creates the PC market
  2. Compaq creates the PC compatible market

Bill Gates has been great for Microsoft and is clearly a smart person and very competitive business man, but was hardly the driver for the PC market in general. If vision=gobbling up market share in a rapidly growing industry, then Bill gates is clearly a visionary. If, on the other hand, vision=new ideas others had not thought of or creating new markets, then I don’t see any evidence of Bill gates being a visionary in that respect.

Microsoft’s primary claim to fame is out-competing other companies using whatever method necessary. They have not traditionally been the first to market with new ideas but rather they have taken over markets that others have been initially successful in.

32

Pixar isn’t really an achievement of Steve Jobs, he wasn’t developing the technology and he certainly wasn’t driving the path of that studio, he just paid the bills. From everything I saw Jobs was much more involved with running NeXT during his years away from Apple than he was with Pixar (a company he bought for relatively little from George Lucas.)

I’m not saying paying the bills isn’t important, but the guys who get credit for Google are Sergey Brin and Larry Page, not the Andy Bechtolsheims (billionaire founder of Sun Microsystems who kicked in angel funding for Google when it was being ran out of their garage) that provided the necessary funding to make it all work.

I don’t know that I’d give Gates credit for XBox Live, either. By the time that came around Microsoft was a mammoth and several of its operating divisions were highly autonomous. Without digging deeper I’m not sure how much of XBox Live Gates can claim credit for (maybe a lot, I suspect relatively little.)

But still, even giving Jobs Pixar I don’t think the history books can really stack up iPhones, iPods, and Pixar and say they represent a greater impact on mankind than widespread adoption of personal computers. Hell, the market for iPods and iPhones wouldn’t exist without the already existent PC market. MP3 players were essentially created to solve a problem PC users had created for themselves when they realized they could have tons of songs on their computer but with no easy way to travel with them outside of just burning optical media.

Without that nucleus of tech savvy people, that were essentially created due to the personal computing revolution, I don’t think the early adopters that products like smartphones depend on would have been around in sufficient numbers. Not to mention the simple fact smartphones are pure emulation of the personal computer, and represent a move to make the power of the PC even more portable and compact. That whole paradigm wouldn’t have been around to emulate if not for Gates. Computers had been around for something like 30+ years before Microsoft Windows started to pick up steam, what people just don’t realize is until Windows broke the arcane and complicated devices down into something the masses could use the world never really know what technology was out there.

33

This is extremely incorrect. Compaq never would have become the company it was if not for Windows. People get way too caught up on the fact that lots of similar products to Windows existed. The problem is they weren’t being pushed as something that you could run cross platform.

What do all those computers from the 80s that were running stuff like OS/2, AmigaOS and etc have in common? Well, what they had in common is that my grandmother who was a treasurer for her church was able to learn OS/2 well enough to run a spreadsheet. But she didn’t have the energy to learn 5 different operating systems. She couldn’t just sit down at another computer at use it, she needed her home computer because that is what she was familiar with. She also wasn’t interested in upgrading to new hardware because learning a new operating system is hard for 75 year old women (and I’m actually proud that my elderly grandmother learned how to use a PC in the 1980s.)

Windows was aiming for something no one else ever was, IBM wasn’t aiming for it, Apple wasn’t aiming for it, no one but Windows was aiming for this concept of an operating system that would work everywhere. There are just massive cumulative benefits to the entire mainstream user base of personal computers for there to be the same underlying operating system. They become more accessible because everyone else you know that uses a computer becomes a help resource. You don’t have to navigate between 50 different books on 10 different operating systems at the book store. You don’t have to know a different OS for work, for school, for home, for anytime you buy a new computer and etc.

There’s a reason the operating systems tied to the machines running them were marginalized for history, and it wasn’t simply because Gates had the best sales force. It was because he was selling the best solution to the problem no one really fully recognized until it was far too late to stop Microsoft from controlling the vast majority of the personal computer OS market. Speaking of Compaq, it’s an interesting reference because during the height of Compaq’s success they used to have a yearly meeting with Microsoft. At the meeting Microsoft would inform Compaq how much Compaq would be paying for operating system licenses to preload onto their systems. The guys from Microsoft just essentially wrote a number down and passed it over to the guys from Compaq. At the time Compaq said their strategy for dealing with Microsoft was to “let the government regulate them.”

34

Widespread adoption of personal computers was happening with or without Microsoft.

35

The PC compatible market was established long before Windows was popular.

Compaq established the compatible market in 1982.

The PC compatible market was established well before Windows. It was a DOS world when the market was exploding, Windows was not part of the equation.

The PC compatible market was already well established. Software from most vendors worked on any compatible because the hardware manufacturers were making sure they created compatible hardware so the software would run.

The hardware manufacturers established a compatible market which increased competition and kept PC prices low and allowed for the market to explode.

There are benefits and there are drawbacks. Either way, Microsoft and Bill Gates deserve credit for competitiveness and execution, but those are not the same things as “vision” (at least not the way I’ve always thought of the word).

Microsoft certainly gets credit for creating Windows instead of just selling DOS and thinking that was good enough. But that doesn’t feel like “vision” given that Apple had GUI’s already.

36

Gate’s vision of a computer in every home caused him to leave Harvard as a sophomore in 1975 and start a software company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His vision long predated the IBM-PC, and Martin’s use of the phrase “Windows” when he should have said “DOS” or “Microsoft” doesn’t change that a bit.

I can understand arguments which have Jobs as having more “vision” but I can’t understand arguments that says that Gates lacked it. :confused:

37

But Windows 95 made computers “mainstream” in a way that previous OSes/platforms weren’t. There were midnight release parties and tons of news stories relating to this new big thing. It changed the way people looked at computers.

And as for the Xbox/Xbox Live. Gates was the driving force internally behind the system’s creation. While the actual engineering work was done by a dedicated team, Gates pushed for the Xbox during a time when the world (and most especially the gaming industry) told him he was crazy to launch a new system against Nintendo, Sony and Sega.

38

Windows 95 was a big thing from a media perspective. But if you look at worldwide PC shipments from early 80’s on you will see relentless growth that was really independent of Win95.

39

But not of Microsoft.

40

I don’t believe Gates is much of a visionary at all. He has stated in interviews that he never foresaw the viability of the GUI interface and felt the command line interface would continue to be the way people would interact with their computers. He said afterward that the GUI was so obvious that he “had a hard time keeping a straight face”. He also stated that he never saw the internet coming. He has at times forecast that voice recognition software would be the next big thing (and that Microsoft would ship theirs before Apple did) and lately he’s been predicting some sort of tabletop computing where people would be able to manipulate files and photos and so forth on the top of coffee-table-like devices.

What Gates did do was respond quickly and effectively once it became apparent that things like the GUI and the internet were going to become a big deal, and he was subsequently able to capture the market on both because of the widespread hold he had gained upon the PC customer base.

Which brings us to Gates’ real accomplishment - acheived largely through a combination of good luck and his mother’s business connections - which was to write and maintain ownership of the OS that would be run on IBM’s personal computers. Because of IBM’s stolid image and reliable reputation among the public, the vast majority of PC buyers flocked to IBM’s computers rather than to the more whimsically named “Apple” and/or other marginal computer makers. And because Gates retained the right to market his OS to other computer makers who were manufacturing clones of the IBM PC, his software, DOS, became the industry standard and made Gates an enormously wealthy man.

And of course, once he finally realized that the GUI was what the public wanted, Gates put Microsoft to work developing the software that would become Windows and which would require several efforts to get right, and he virtually turned his company on a dime with the advent of the internet and created Internet Explorer. But IE and Windows, both being DOS-dependent, were crappy programs and they remained so for a good long time, their success being due solely due to the fact that Microsoft’s DOS operating system ran most of the PCs in operation, again due to the widewpread acceptance of IBM computers and its clones.

Jobs, on the other hand, recognized the significance of the graphical user interface from the instant first he saw one in operation at Xerox PARC and it was largely what made the Macintosh the computing phenomenon that it became. Jobs purchased George Lucas’ software company and grew it into Pixar, which became an enormous success thanks to his initial guidance. He single-handedly turned the music business on its ear with the iPod, the smart phone business on its ear with iPhone, and now the iPad is a huge success and Apple can’t keep up with the demand for them.

Some people like to think that Jobs creates products and then persuades people that they want them. I’d say he envisions products that people will want and then builds them in such a way as to maximize their appeal and functionality, with attractiveness and ease of use playing a key role in each.

Both are brillant and extraordinary men and superb CEOs. But IMO there’s simply no question that Jobs is not only the most visionary of the two, but perhaps even the only visionary of the two.