Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

InfoWorld.
When they happened to meet in the hallway at a conference, Jobs started berating Gates for his 
refusal to do software for NeXT. “When you get a market, I will consider it,” Gates replied. Jobs 
got angry. “It was a screaming battle, right in front of everybody,” recalled Adele Goldberg, the 
Xerox PARC engineer. Jobs insisted that NeXT was the next wave of computing. Gates, as he 
often did, got more expressionless as Jobs got more heated. He finally just shook his head and 
walked away.
Beneath their personal rivalry—and occasional grudging respect—was their basic philosophical 
difference. Jobs believed in an end-to-end integration of hardware and software, which led him to 
build a machine that was not compatible with others. Gates believed in, and profited from, a world 
in which different companies made machines that were compatible with one another; their 
hardware ran a standard operating system (Microsoft’s Windows) and could all use the same 
software apps (such as Microsoft’s Word and Excel). “His product comes with an interesting 
feature called incompatibility,” Gates told the 
Washington Post.
“It doesn’t run any of the existing 
software. It’s a super-nice computer. I don’t think if I went out to design an incompatible 
computer I would have done as well as he did.”
At a forum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1989, Jobs and Gates appeared sequentially, laying 
out their competing worldviews. Jobs spoke about how new waves come along in the computer 
industry every few years. Macintosh had launched a revolutionary new approach with the 
graphical interface; now NeXT was doing it with object-oriented programming tied to a powerful 
new machine based on an optical disk. Every major software vendor realized they had to be part of 
this new wave, he said, “except Microsoft.” When Gates came up, he reiterated his belief that 
Jobs’s end-to-end control of the software and the hardware was destined for failure, just as Apple 
had failed in competing against the Microsoft Windows standard. “The hardware market and the 
software market are separate,” he said. When asked about the great design that could come from 
Jobs’s approach, Gates gestured to the NeXT prototype that was still sitting onstage and sneered, 
“If you want black, I’ll get you a can of paint.”
IBM
Jobs came up with a brilliant jujitsu maneuver against Gates, one that could have changed the 
balance of power in the computer industry forever. It required Jobs to do two things that were 
against his nature: licensing out his software to another hardware maker and getting into bed with 
IBM. He had a pragmatic streak, albeit a tiny one, so he was able to overcome his reluctance. But 
his heart was never fully in it, which is why the alliance would turn out to be short-lived.
It began at a party, a truly memorable one, for the seventieth birthday of the 
Washington Post
publisher Katharine Graham in June 1987 in Washington. Six hundred guests attended, including 
President Ronald Reagan. Jobs flew in from California and IBM’s chairman John Akers from 
New York. It was the first time they had met. Jobs took the opportunity to bad-mouth Microsoft 
and attempt to wean IBM from using its Windows operating system. “I couldn’t resist telling him 
I thought IBM was taking a giant gamble betting its entire software strategy on Microsoft, because 
I didn’t think its software was very good,” Jobs recalled.
To Jobs’s delight, Akers replied, “How would you like to help us?” Within a few weeks Jobs 
showed up at IBM’s Armonk, New York, headquarters with his software engineer Bud Tribble. 
They put on a demo of NeXT, which impressed the IBM engineers. Of particular significance was 
NeXTSTEP, the machine’s object-oriented operating system. “NeXTSTEP took care of a lot of 
trivial programming chores that slow down the software development process,” said Andrew 
Heller, the general manager of IBM’s workstation unit, who was so impressed by Jobs that he 
named his newborn son Steve.
The negotiations lasted into 1988, with Jobs becoming prickly over tiny details. He would stalk 
out of meetings over disagreements about colors or design, only to be calmed down by Tribble or 
Lewin. He didn’t seem to know which frightened him more, IBM or Microsoft. In April Perot 

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decided to play host for a mediating session at his Dallas headquarters, and a deal was struck: IBM 
would license the current version of the NeXTSTEP software, and if the managers liked it, they 
would use it on some of their workstations. IBM sent to Palo Alto a 125-page contract. Jobs tossed 
it down without reading it. “You don’t get it,” he said as he walked out of the room. He demanded 
a simpler contract of only a few pages, which he got within a week.
Jobs wanted to keep the arrangement secret from Bill Gates until the big unveiling of the NeXT 
computer, scheduled for October. But IBM insisted on being forthcoming. Gates was furious. He 
realized this could wean IBM off its dependence on Microsoft operating systems. “NeXTSTEP 
isn’t compatible with anything,” he raged to IBM executives.
At first Jobs seemed to have pulled off Gates’s worst nightmare. Other computer makers that 
were beholden to Microsoft’s operating systems, most notably Compaq and Dell, came to ask Jobs 
for the right to clone NeXT and license NeXTSTEP. There were even offers to pay a lot more if 
NeXT would get out of the hardware business altogether.
That was too much for Jobs, at least for the time being. He cut off the clone discussions. And he 
began to cool toward IBM. The chill became reciprocal. When the person who made the deal at 
IBM moved on, Jobs went to Armonk to meet his replacement, Jim Cannavino. They cleared the 
room and talked one-on-one. Jobs demanded more money to keep the relationship going and to 
license newer versions of NeXTSTEP to IBM. Cannavino made no commitments, and he 
subsequently stopped returning Jobs’s phone calls. The deal lapsed. NeXT got a bit of money for a 
licensing fee, but it never got the chance to change the world.