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This bickering must stop

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs continue to have rather snarky arguments with one another, even though Steve Jobs (Z”L) has been dead for some time now.

2 comments to This bickering must stop

  • RRS

    My memory may be faulty, but didn’t MSFT make a critical to AAPL investment in AAPL right at the time Jobs returned to that company?

  • Yes, but in return Apple quickly agreed to settle a lot of outstanding litigation that had come into being before Jobs’ return, and Microsoft got some relief in the antitrust cases outstanding against it at the time. Gates also agreed that Microsoft would continue writing software for the Mac, This was not a great concession, as Microsoft never had any intention of not doing so, and Microsoft’s Apple software division is highly profitable to this day. And for that matter Microsoft made a large profit on those shares when it finally sold them. As much as anything, the deal was about making it easy for the two companies to do business with one another subsequently.

    In truth, Microsoft and Apple (and Gates and Jobs) have often worked together when it was in their interests to do so, right from at least 1978 to the present day. Saying that one of them was the winner and the other was the loser is ridiculous – they were both very big winners. (Yay capitalism). They had different philosophies though and different business strategies. Hence the bickering.