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

Wall Street Journal
columnists Walt 
Mossberg and Kara Swisher worked to get them together for a joint interview. Mossberg first 
invited Jobs, who didn’t go to many such conferences, and was surprised when he said he would 
do it if Gates would. On hearing that, Gates accepted as well.
Mossberg wanted the evening joint appearance to be a cordial discussion, not a debate, but that 
seemed less likely when Jobs unleashed a swipe at Microsoft during a solo interview earlier that 
day. Asked about the fact that Apple’s iTunes software for Windows computers was extremely 
popular, Jobs joked, “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.”
So when it was time for Gates and Jobs to meet in the green room before their joint session that 
evening, Mossberg was worried. Gates got there first, with his aide Larry Cohen, who had briefed 
him about Jobs’s remark earlier that day. When Jobs ambled in a few minutes later, he grabbed a 
bottle of water from the ice bucket and sat down. After a moment or two of silence, Gates said, 
“So I guess I’m the representative from hell.” He wasn’t smiling. Jobs paused, gave him one of his 
impish grins, and handed him the ice water. Gates relaxed, and the tension dissipated.
The result was a fascinating duet, in which each wunderkind of the digital age spoke warily, 
and then warmly, about the other. Most memorably they gave candid answers when the 
technology strategist Lise Buyer, who was in the audience, asked what each had learned from 
observing the other. “Well, I’d give a lot to have Steve’s taste,” Gates answered. There was a bit 
of nervous laughter; Jobs had famously said, ten years earlier, that his problem with Microsoft was 
that it had absolutely no taste. But Gates insisted he was serious. Jobs was a “natural in terms of 

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intuitive taste.” He recalled how he and Jobs used to sit together reviewing the software that 
Microsoft was making for the Macintosh. “I’d see Steve make the decision based on a sense of 
people and product that, you know, is hard for me to explain. The way he does things is just 
different and I think it’s magical. And in that case, wow.”
Jobs stared at the floor. Later he told me that he was blown away by how honest and gracious 
Gates had just been. Jobs was equally honest, though not quite as gracious, when his turn came. 
He described the great divide between the Apple theology of building end-to-end integrated 
products and Microsoft’s openness to licensing its software to competing hardware makers. In the 
music market, the integrated approach, as manifested in his iTunes-iPod package, was proving to 
be the better, he noted, but Microsoft’s decoupled approach was faring better in the personal 
computer market. One question he raised in an offhand way was: Which approach might work 
better for mobile phones?
Then he went on to make an insightful point: This difference in design philosophy, he said, led 
him and Apple to be less good at collaborating with other companies. “Because Woz and I started 
the company based on doing the whole banana, we weren’t so good at partnering with people,” he 
said. “And I think if Apple could have had a little more of that in its DNA, it would have served it 
extremely well.”

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