Amaya Toman The relationship between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates was considered by many to be problematic and they both considered each other rivals. The truth is that their relationship had many friendly aspects, and that Jobs and Gates did not only have that legendary interview on stage at the D5 conference in 2007. They gave a joint interview, for example, at the end of August 1991 for Fortune magazine, on whose pages they discussed the future of personal computers.
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The aforementioned interview was held ten years after IBM released its first IBM PC, and it was the first ever joint interview of these two giants. In 1991, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were at completely different stages in their career lives. Gates' Microsoft had a bright future ahead of it - it was only a few years away from the release of the legendary Windows 95 - while Jobs was trying to coax his relatively newly founded NeXT and bought out Pixar. Brent Schlender, the later author of the biographical book Becoming Steve Jobs, gave an interview to Fortune at the time, and the interview took place in Jobs' new home in Palo Alto, California. This place was not chosen by chance - it was the idea of Steve Jobs, who strongly insisted that the interview take place at his home.
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Despite his habits, Jobs did not promote any of his products in the said interview. For example, Jobs' conversation with Gates revolved around Microsoft - while Jobs persistently dug into Gates, Gates scolded Jobs for being jealous of his company's popularity. Jobs countered by claiming that Gates' Microsoft was bringing "great new technologies that Apple pioneered" to personal computers, and among other things, he also confidently stated that tens of millions of PC owners were unnecessarily using computers that weren't nearly as good as they could be. .
There's a world of difference between the 1991 Fortune interview and the 5 D2007 joint appearance. A certain bitterness and sarcasm, which was evident in the interview for Fortune, disappeared over time, the mutual relationship between Jobs and Gates underwent significant changes and moved to a friendlier and more collegial level. But the interview for Fortune can still serve today as a testimony of how Jobs' and Gates' careers differed at the time, and how personal computers were perceived at that time.
