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The Battle of the GUI
At that time, Microsoft was producing an operating system, known as DOS, which it licensed to
IBM and compatible computers. It was based on an old-fashioned command line interface that
confronted users with surly little prompts such as C:\>. As Jobs and his team began to work
closely with Microsoft, they grew worried that it would copy Macintosh’s graphical user interface.
Andy Hertzfeld noticed that his contact at Microsoft was asking detailed questions about how the
Macintosh operating system worked. “I told Steve that I suspected that Microsoft was going to
clone the Mac,” he recalled.
They were right to worry. Gates believed that graphical interfaces were the future, and that
Microsoft had just as much right as Apple did to copy what had been developed at Xerox PARC.
As he freely admitted later, “We sort of say, ‘Hey, we believe in graphics interfaces, we saw the
Xerox Alto too.’”
In their original deal, Jobs had convinced Gates to agree that Microsoft would not create
graphical software for anyone other than Apple until a year after the Macintosh shipped in January
1983. Unfortunately for Apple, it did not provide for the possibility that the Macintosh launch
would be delayed for a year. So Gates was within his rights when, in November 1983, he revealed
that Microsoft planned to develop a new operating system for IBM PCs featuring a graphical
interface with windows, icons, and a mouse for point-and-click navigation. It would be called
Windows. Gates hosted a Jobs-like product announcement, the most lavish thus far in Microsoft’s
history, at the Helmsley Palace Hotel in New York.
Jobs was furious. He knew there was little he could do about it—Microsoft’s deal with Apple
not to do competing graphical software was running out—but he lashed out nonetheless. “Get
Gates down here immediately,” he ordered Mike Boich, who was Apple’s evangelist to other
software companies. Gates arrived, alone and willing to discuss things with Jobs. “He called me
down to get pissed off at me,” Gates recalled. “I went down to Cupertino, like a command
performance. I told him, ‘We’re doing Windows.’ I said to him, ‘We’re betting our company on
graphical interfaces.’”
They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple
employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him. Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. “You’
re ripping us off!” he shouted. “I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!” Hertzfeld recalled
that Gates just sat there coolly, looking Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice,
what became a classic zinger. “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I
think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal
the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
Gates’s two-day visit provoked the full range of Jobs’s emotional responses and manipulation
techniques. It also made clear that the Apple-Microsoft symbiosis had become a scorpion dance,
with both sides circling warily, knowing that a sting by either could cause problems for both. After
the confrontation in the conference room, Gates quietly gave Jobs a private demo of what was
being planned for Windows. “Steve didn’t know what to say,” Gates recalled. “He could either
say, ‘Oh, this is a violation of something,’ but he didn’t. He chose to say, ‘Oh, it’s actually really a
piece of shit.’” Gates was thrilled, because it gave him a chance to calm Jobs down for a moment.
“I said, ‘Yes, it’s a nice little piece of shit.’” So Jobs went through a gamut of other emotions.
“During the course of this meeting, he’s just ruder than shit,” Gates said. “And then there’s a part
where he’s almost crying, like, ‘Oh, just give me a chance to get this thing off.’” Gates responded
by becoming very calm. “I’m good at when people are emotional, I’m kind of less emotional.”
As he often did when he wanted to have a serious conversation, Jobs suggested they go on a
long walk. They trekked the streets of Cupertino, back and forth to De Anza college, stopping at a
diner and then walking some more. “We had to take a walk, which is not one of my management
techniques,” Gates said. “That was when he began saying things like, ‘Okay, okay, but don’t make
it too much like what we’re doing.’”
As it turned out, Microsoft wasn’t able to get Windows 1.0 ready
for shipping until the fall of 1985. Even then, it was a shoddy product. It lacked the elegance of
the Macintosh interface, and it had tiled windows rather than the magical clipping of overlapping
windows that Bill Atkinson had devised. Reviewers ridiculed it and consumers spurned it.
Nevertheless, as is often the case with Microsoft products, persistence eventually made Windows
better and then dominant.
Jobs never got over his anger. “They just ripped us off completely, because Gates has no
shame,” Jobs told me almost thirty years later. Upon hearing this, Gates responded, “If he believes
that, he really has entered into one of his own reality distortion fields.” In a legal sense, Gates was
right, as courts over the years have subsequently ruled. And on a practical level, he had a strong
case as well. Even though Apple made a deal for the right to use what it saw at Xerox PARC, it
was inevitable that other companies would develop similar graphical interfaces. As Apple found
out, the “look and feel” of a computer interface design is a hard thing to protect.
And yet Jobs’s dismay was understandable. Apple had been more innovative, imaginative,
elegant in execution, and brilliant in design. But even though Microsoft created a crudely copied
series of products, it would end up winning the war of operating systems. This exposed an
aesthetic flaw in how the universe worked: The best and most innovative products don’t always
win. A decade later, this truism caused Jobs to let loose a rant that was somewhat arrogant and
over-the-top, but also had a whiff of truth to it. “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have
no taste, they have absolutely no taste,” he said. “I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a
big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into
their product.”
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