Gates vs. Jobs: The Rematch
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With Microsoft's entrance into the portable music business, Apple's Steve Jobs must do what he has failed to do in the past: prevail over his old nemesis, Bill Gates.
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Microsoft and Google look set to clash over their rival ways of searching desktop computers.
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SAN JOSE, Calif.  -- Seeking to be more competitive with Microsoft Corp...
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COMMENTARY -- Jim Allchin has a thing about video. The Windows chief is a brilliant engineer, keeper of Redmond&#39;s crown jewels, and easily the most powerful person at Microsoft after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
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Was the Novell/Microsoft deal a worthwhile well-meaning effort between renegade open-source geeks at Microsoft and geeks at Novell that got derailed by salespeople and management, after which it was turned into a nightmare deal with the devil?  I raise this question because I know someone with ties to people at both Microsoft and Novell.  He has a credible story to tell about what really happened, and how much it differs from what we now know about the Novell/Microsoft deal.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get him to write up the history - yet.  While I continue to pester him, here's the short version, third hand.
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Let's argue both sides of Microsoft by the water cooler.
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Microsoft is on the move again. As it has in the past, the software giant is trying to elbow aside rivals who have pioneered new markets.
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p2pnet.net News:- It&#39;s Apple vs Apple again - that&#39;s to say Steve Jobs&#39; Apple versus The Beatles&#39; Apple. Apple-B claims Apple-J infringes its trade mark and the latter, &quot;is likely to be forced into a multimillion
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Opinion: Michael Gartenberg looks at two upcoming operating system releases. His judgment? Advantage Apple.
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By Dwight Silverman, Houston Chronicle  Dec. 19--If you talk to a hard-core techie who's a user of the Linux operating system or one of the zealots who worship Apple's Macintosh, you won't hear many nice things said about Microsoft.
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The last time computer scientists truly changed the way people communicate with PCs, they created the mouse. Microsoft Chairman William H. Gates III thinks his company might have the next breakthrough.
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(InfoWorld) - As this year's WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference) approaches, Apple fans are furiously speculating on what kind of news will be dropped on us in San Francisco. We already know about the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard preview, and no doubt Apple CEO Steve Jobs will have something to say about the iPhone. But from what I know about the players and the IT landscape, I think Jobs has another "just one more thing" up his sleeve. I've been looking at what Apple and its partners need to do to fill gaps in their product line-up. At the moment, I think the Macintosh platform's biggest weakness is its reliance on Microsoft Office for productivity software. Microsoft has always built solid products for Mac -- but they were always just a bit behind or somehow incompatible with their Windows equivalents. Entourage does 90 percent of what Outlook does, but it lacks features right where it hurts: In enterprise settings. Word for Mac doesn't have the same Macro or OOXML support as the PC version. PowerPoint files are still not 100 percent compatible between platforms. Basically, Apple and its customers get the short end of the Microsoft stick. Add to that the industry move toward Web 2.0 applications and Cloud computing -- and a number of other recent shifts in the technology landscape -- and you have a climate for change. I don't think Apple wants to wait on Microsoft to delegate how its business applications will work. In fact, I think Apple would like to move forward with a leading-edge partner like, say, Google and create business rather than follow in it. That's why I think Jobs will take the stage at WWDC next week and announce that Apple and Google are going to team up to bring Google Apps to .Mac customers. Let's connect some dots and see what picture emerges: In a recent stockholder meeting, Jobs admitted that .Mac has hasn't achieved its full potential but said the company is working on it. Eric Schmidt, Google CEO and a member of the Apple Board, has said there are a lot of Apple-Google partnerships to come because both companies have "common competitors." Hmmmm. Microsoft is a common competitor, and its bread and butter -- aside from Windows -- is Office. We've already seen a flurry of Google Applications for Macintosh, plus GMaps and Gmail on the iPhone, so why not Google Docs and Spreadsheets integrated into .Mac? Seems like a perfect fit. Using iChat as a guide, we know that another network -- AOL -- allowed .Mac users to use their own xxx@mac.com address as their AOL Instant Messenger screen name. Google could do the same thing in Apps. Perhaps the whole mac.com domain would be ported to Google Apps. Google has lots of cheap, fast space. It also has the ability and desire to search it and advertise on it (monetize it). Gmail has won the battle against .Mac's mail for most Macintosh users. As for calendar/IM/address book integration, disk space, and spam detection, Google wins most of the battles hands down. Google spends $5 per domain for Apps users through its Adsense subsidiary. It wants more non-paying users, and Apple would be happy to offload its .Mac users. Those users, who pay $100 a year as .Mac members, could get a premium version of Google Apps with desktop backups and larger file space as well as the benefits they currently enjoy. Apple's focus is on hardware and software. It should -- and should want to -- stick with what it does best. We know that iChat in Leopard has a special account preference for GTalk accounts. Of course, you can currently use any Jabber server in iChat -- GTalk is based on Jabber -- but it's interesting that Apple has split off GTalk from the rest of the Jabber servers. It has been 18 months, forever in software development at Apple, since the iWork app was last updated. That is lots of time for Apple to do some pretty interesting things. I would love to see Apple enter the Blog editing game, where MarsEdit, Ecto, and Journaler are sweeping up. Such a move would be a serious game changer for the fight on the Mac platform between Apple's Pages and Microsoft's Word. And for Google, what better way to get into blog editing than with its Writley technology? Google needs a Keynote type of presentation tool; Apple needs a spreadsheet tool to round out their Office competition. Each has what the other needs. Throw Sun's OpenOffice.org into the mix. The first native Alpha release of this software came out this week. Both Apple and Google have been playing very nice with Sun lately. iWork. The most important piece of the puzzle might just be iWork, which could be a caching front end for Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Use it when you are on an airplane, at grandma's house with no Internet, in the subway, or wherever Internet access is spotty. Or how about this curveball: Apple could port its iWork and iLife applications to Windows? Quicktime and iTunes already enjoy a large following in the Windows camp. Woo them with the apps, win them over to the OS. Oh, and one more thing. I realize we're flopping off of the deep end here, but what if Apple were to sell a Leopard virtual machine for Windows that functions like Parallels in Coherence mode (except you'd have the Mac OS running in Windows, not the other way around)? The result: Run Leopard anywhere! You could even boot from a Google hosted OS. This need not be a full version, mind you, but a stripped down, embedded version of the Mac OS like what's being thrown into Apple TV and the iPhone. One of the great things about virtualization is that there's less need for drivers and such, which makes installing small Google or Apple apps on your Windows desktop easier. Okay, that scenario could be years away, or never to be. But I think there is every chance that we'll hear something about .Mac integration with Google Apps next week. It makes sense for all parties and would finally give Microsoft a run for its money. Plus, there's that old saying: the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Seth Weintraub is a global IT management consultant specializing in the technology needs of creative organizations, including The Paris Times, Omnicom and WPP Group. He has set up and managed cross-platform networks on four continents and is an expert in Active Directory/Open Directory PC and Macintosh integration.
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By Dean Takahashi, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  May 30--When Bill Gates talked about a new kind of computer in a speech a couple of years ago, I thought it was pure fantasy.
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STEVE JOBS, Apple's boss, on his often tense relationship with Microsoft founder Bill Gates  (c) 2007 Independent on Sunday, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning.
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Steven P. Jobs has succeeded in building expectations for what some have called âthe God machine.â
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By San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  May 30--A SHARED HISTORY   1975 -- Bill Gates and Paul Allen co-found Microsoft.   1976 -- Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-found Apple.   1981 -- Gates licenses DOS to IBM; Jobs visits Gates in August shortly after IBM PC is introduced.
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(InfoWorld) - SAN FRANCISCO -- In what was certainly the marquee event at this year's D: All Things Digital conference, an annual gathering coordinated by the Wall Street Journal, Steve Jobs shared the stage with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates in a joint appearance discussing the technology industry's past while looking ahead to its future. The evening began with history repeating itself in the form of videos originally recorded in 1984, 1991, and 1997, in which the two men shared a stage. The video ended with Jobs and Gates entering from opposite ends of the D: All Things Digital stage. The session was hosted by Wall Street Journal technology columnists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Swisher started by asked the two men what each has contributed to their industry. "Bill built the first software company in the industry. And I think he built the first software company before anyone in our industry knew what a software company was, and that was huge. And the business model they ended up pursuing ended up working really well," said Jobs. "Bill was focused on software before anyone else had a clue. There's a lot more you can say, but that's the high-order bit." "First I want to clarify, I'm not Fake Steve Jobs," said Gates, to peals of laughter from the audience, referring to the popular weblog. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates capped off Wednesday's D: All Things Digital conference with a joint session of tech industry heavyweights. The good old days "What Steve's done is phenomenal," Gates continued. "Back in 1977, the Apple II, the idea that it would be a mass-market machine and an incredibly empowering phenomenon. And the Macintosh, that was so risky. Apple really bet the company, Lisa hadn't done that well, but the team that Steve built within the company to pursue that, some days it felt a little ahead of its time, remember the Twiggy disk drive and..." Jobs interjected, "128K!" "In a certain sense we build the products we want to use ourselves," Gates continues. "He's really pursued that with an incredible taste and elegance and had a huge impact on the industry. Apple literally was failing when Steve went back and reinfused innovation and risk-taking that have been phenomenal. So the industry has benefitted immensely from his work. I'd say he's contributed as much as anyone." Jobs called Gates and himself "incredibly lucky" to attract great partners and great people to work with. He agreed with Mossberg's assessment that in a sense, he and Gates are standing in for all the people at both their companies. Jobs ruefully recalled some of Apple's early television advertisements. "We had a kitchen, with the wife typing in recipes and the husband looking on approvingly," he said, to laughter from the audience. Jobs and Gates also recalled Microsoft's efforts to provide floating point computation in the Apple II's BASIC programming language. "My partner, Steve Wozniak, brilliant guy. Writes the best BASIC on the planet," Jobs said. "Perfect in every way, except for one thing: it's just fixed point, not floating point. So we're getting a lot of input, please make it floating point. I'm begging Woz, and he just doesn't do it. He wrote it down on paper, never got around to doing it. So Microsoft had this very popular, very good floating point BASIC. And we went to them." Gates picked up the story from there. "It was $31,000 for the floating point BASIC. And I went down to Apple getting the cassette tapes to work," he added. Gates and Jobs both agreed that Microsoft made a huge bet with the Macintosh when Apple first introduced the new computer. "What's hard to remember now, is that Microsoft wasn't in the applications business then," Jobs said. "We made this bet that this paradigm shift would happen, to graphical interfaces, and that the Mac would be the one to do it," said Gates. "The big bet wasn't Mac versus Windows, it was character-mode versus graphics interface." Gates added that Microsoft eventually saw the benefits of that bet come home to roost when PC-compatible computers were outfitted with 386-era microprocessors. The bad old days Jobs recalls 1997, the year he returned to Apple after a decade running Next. "Apple was in very serious trouble. and what was clear, where if the game was a zero-sum game, where for Apple to win, Microsoft had to lose. And if that was the case, Apple would lose," he said. "A lot of people's heads were in that place ... There were too many people at Apple playing [that] game. It was clear that you didn't have to play that game." "Apple had to remember who Apple was, because it had forgotten," he added. Jobs' decision was to call Bill up. "And we tried to patch things up." Gates said that since then, Microsoft has had a dedicated Macintosh application development group -- the Mac Business Unit, or MacBU, which works very closely with Apple. "It's a great business for us," he said. A good natured rivalry? Gates and Jobs also traded comments about the Mac vs. PC television advertisements that pit actors John Hodgman and Justin Long against each other, as an anthropomorphic Windows PC and Mac, respectively. Jobs said the art of those advertisements is not to be mean, but for the guys to like each other. "His mother loves him," said Gates, ruefully, about the PC character. "PC Guy is what makes it all work," added Jobs, but Gates seemed unconvinced. Mossberg noted that Apple and Microsoft continue to vie for the hearts and minds of consumers -- recently with the Zune, Microsoft's iPod competitor, and Vista, Microsoft's new operating system that has been pitted against Mac OS X in numerous head-to-head comparisons in magazines and tech Web sites. Jobs reiterated a point he made with Mossberg during his session earlier in the day: The iPod, said Jobs, is a response to the development of digital music players by Japanese consumer electronics makers, who, in Jobs' opinion could create great boxes but not develop good software to manage them. The iPod and the Mac are both principally differentiated from their competitors by the software that drives them. "So the big secret about Apple is that Apple views itself as a software company. And there aren't very many software companies left. And Microsoft is a software company," said Jobs. "We look at what they do, and some is really great, and some is competitive, and some of it's not." Apple's goal is much more modest than world domination, said Jobs. "We don't think we're going to have 80 percent of the market," he said, doubtlessly disappointing legions of Mac enthusiasts. "We're happy when our market share goes up a point." The future of computing Jobs cited Apple alumnus Alan Kay next, and illustrated a key difference between himself and his colleague and rival. "Alan Kay said, people who love software want to do their own hardware," said Jobs. "I can resist that," retorted Gates. Jobs waxed philosophical. "In the consumer market at least, I think one can make a pretty strong case that outside of Windows on PCs, it's hard to see other examples of the software and hardware being decoupled working super well yet," said Jobs. "It might in the phone space over time, it might, but it's not clear." Gates believes the future of computing is what he describes as "rich local functionality." He points to single-function computers and network computers as examples of devices that didn't sell as well as the industry expected. "It's using local richness together with richness elsewhere," he added. Jobs agrees with Gates, and provided what he believes is a practical example of Apple's innovation at work when it comes to providing users with a rich local experience combined with remote data: the Google Maps functionality embedded on Apple's forthcoming iPhone, which ships in late June. "The experience is unbelievable, way better than a computer. And that client app is the result of a lot of technology on the client. And you can't do that stuff in a browser," said Jobs. Gates opined that in five years' time, consumers won't depend on a single computer -- they'll have multiple devices, such as a tablet with "voice and ink," along with "a phone, a pocket-sized device." Jobs sees a history for the same computer we've grown accustomed to. "As Bill said earlier, the death of the PC has been repeatedly predicted," he said. The PC will continue to be with us and will evolve, Jobs added. Jobs forsees "an explosion" of what he describes as "post-PC devices" such as the iPod. "There's a category of devices that aren't as general-purpose," he said, "And that category is going to continue to be very innovative. And we're going to see lots of them." Jobs said that those "Post-PC devices" are very attractive because they represent "a clean slate" that lacks the legacy of many applications and are more focused. "But you have to temper it, because you have users who don't want a car with six wheels," he said. The oldest guys in the room Asked by Kara Swisher to define the greatest misunderstanding in their relationship, Jobs joked, "We've kept our marriage secret for over a decade now." "We did look a lot younger in that video," Gates ruminated. He added that many of the people both Gates and Jobs worked with in the early days have moved on to other things. "I actually kind of miss some of the people who aren't around anymore," he said. Jobs explained that when they started out, he and Gates were often the youngest guys in the room. Now they're often the oldest. "I say everything in life is like a Beatles song or a Bob Dylan song. But there's that one line in that one Beatles song, 'You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.' And that clearly is true here." Following Swisher and Mossberg's questions, the audience was given an opportunity to ask the two captains of the computer industry their own questions. Queries ran the gamut from politics to entrepreneurialism. Gates said that his life's work -- development of the personal computer -- led him to want to create his charitable foundation to benefit people "who haven't had technology, including medicine, working for them." Jobs said he's unconcerned with his own legacy, calling himself and Gates "the two luckiest guys on the planet." "I just think about going in every day and being around these great people," he said. Asked to give advice for others considering starting their own businesses, Gates explained that in the early days, he and his colleagues never considered the value of the company they were developing. "It's all about the people and the passion, and it's amazing the business worked out the way it did." Asked if there was there anything that one envies about the other, Gates cited Jobs' "intuitive taste, both for people and products." As for Jobs, he said that he wished he and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak learned earlier how to partner with others, as Microsoft had. "If Apple had more of that in its DNA, it would have served it really well. And it didn't learn that until a couple decades later." Jobs' appearance alongside Gates capped off a busy day at the D: All Things Digital conference for the Apple CEO. Earlier, during his solo session, Jobs unveiled Apple TV's forthcoming support for YouTube videos and discussed the DRM-free content that became available via iTunes earlier Wednesday.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!