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

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
GATES AND JOBS
When Orbits Intersect
Jobs and Gates, 1991
The Macintosh Partnership
In astronomy, a binary system occurs when the orbits of two stars are linked because of their 
gravitational interaction. There have been analogous situations in history, when an era is shaped 
by the relationship and rivalry of two orbiting superstars: Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr in 
twentieth-century physics, for example, or Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in early 
American governance. For the first thirty years of the personal computer age, beginning in the late 
1970s, the defining binary star system was composed of two high-energy college dropouts both 
born in 1955.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, despite their similar ambitions at the confluence of technology and 
business, had very different personalities and backgrounds. Gates’s father was a prominent Seattle 
lawyer, his mother a civic leader on a variety of prestigious boards. He became a tech geek at the 
area’s finest private school, Lakeside High, but he was never a rebel, hippie, spiritual seeker, or 
member of the counterculture. Instead of a Blue Box to rip off the phone company, Gates created 
for his school a program for scheduling classes, which helped him get into ones with the right 
girls, and a car-counting program for local traffic engineers. He went to Harvard, and when he 
decided to drop out it was not to find enlightenment with an Indian guru but to start a computer 
software company.
Gates was good at computer coding, unlike Jobs, and his mind was more practical, disciplined, 
and abundant in analytic processing power. Jobs was more intuitive and romantic and had a 
greater instinct for making technology usable, design delightful, and interfaces friendly. He had a 
passion for perfection, which made him fiercely demanding, and he managed by charisma and 
scattershot intensity. Gates was more methodical; he held tightly scheduled product review 
meetings where he would cut to the heart of issues with lapidary skill. Both could be rude, but 
with Gates—who early in his career seemed to have a typical geek’s flirtation with the fringes of 
the Asperger’s scale—the cutting behavior tended to be less personal, based more on intellectual 
incisiveness than emotional callousness. Jobs would stare at people with a burning, wounding 
intensity; Gates sometimes had trouble making eye contact, but he was fundamentally humane.

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“Each one thought he was smarter than the other one, but Steve generally treated Bill as 
someone who was slightly inferior, especially in matters of taste and style,” said Andy Hertzfeld. 
“Bill looked down on Steve because he couldn’t actually program.” From the beginning of their 
relationship, Gates was fascinated by Jobs and slightly envious of his mesmerizing effect on 
people. But he also found him “fundamentally odd” and “weirdly flawed as a human being,” and 
he was put off by Jobs’s rudeness and his tendency to be “either in the mode of saying you were 
shit or trying to seduce you.” For his part, Jobs found Gates unnervingly narrow. “He’d be a 
broader guy if he had dropped 
acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger,” Jobs once declared.
Their differences in personality and character would lead them to opposite sides of what would 
become the fundamental divide in the digital age. Jobs was a perfectionist who craved control and 
indulged in the uncompromising temperament of an artist; he and Apple became the exemplars of 
a digital strategy that tightly integrated hardware, software, and content into a seamless package. 
Gates was a smart, calculating, and pragmatic analyst of business and technology; he was open to 
licensing Microsoft’s operating system and software to a variety of manufacturers.
After thirty years Gates would develop a grudging respect for Jobs. “He really never knew 
much about technology, but he had an amazing instinct for what works,” he said. But Jobs never 
reciprocated by fully appreciating Gates’s real strengths. “Bill is basically unimaginative and has 
never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than 
technology,” Jobs said, unfairly. “He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”
When the Macintosh was first being developed, Jobs went up to visit Gates at his office near 
Seattle. Microsoft had written some applications for the Apple II, including a spreadsheet program 
called Multiplan, and Jobs wanted to excite Gates and Co. about doing even more for the 
forthcoming Macintosh. Sitting in Gates’s conference room, Jobs spun an enticing vision of a 
computer for the masses, with a friendly interface, which would be churned out by the millions in 
an automated California factory. His description of the dream factory sucking in the California 
silicon components and turning out finished Macintoshes caused the Microsoft team to code-name 
the project “Sand.” They even reverse-engineered it into an acronym, for “Steve’s amazing new 
device.”
Gates had launched Microsoft by writing a version of BASIC, a programming language, for the 
Altair. Jobs wanted Microsoft to write a version of BASIC for the Macintosh, because Wozniak—
despite much prodding by Jobs—had never enhanced his version of the Apple II’s BASIC to 
handle floating-point numbers. In addition, 
Jobs wanted Microsoft to write application software—such as word processing and spreadsheet 
programs—for the Macintosh. At the time, Jobs was a king and Gates still a courtier: In 1982 
Apple’s annual sales were $1 billion, while Microsoft’s were a mere $32 million. Gates signed on 
to do graphical versions of a new spreadsheet called Excel, a word-processing program called 
Word, and BASIC.
Gates frequently went to Cupertino for demonstrations of the Macintosh operating system, and 
he was not very impressed. “I remember the first time we went down, Steve had this app where it 
was just things bouncing around on the screen,” he said. “That was the only app that ran.” Gates 
was also put off by Jobs’s attitude. “It was kind of a weird seduction visit, where Steve was 
saying, ‘We don’t really need you and we’re doing this great thing, and it’s under the cover.’ He’s 
in his Steve Jobs sales mode, but kind of the sales mode that also says, ‘I don’t need you, but I 
might let you be involved.’”
The Macintosh pirates found Gates hard to take. “You could tell that Bill Gates was not a very 
good listener. He couldn’t bear to have anyone explain how something worked to him—he had to 
leap ahead instead and guess about how he thought it would work,” Hertzfeld recalled. They 
showed him how the Macintosh’s cursor moved smoothly across the screen without flickering. 
“What kind of hardware do you use to draw the cursor?” Gates asked. Hertzfeld, who took great 
pride that they could achieve their functionality solely using software, replied, “We don’t have any 
special hardware for it!” Gates insisted that it was necessary to have special hardware to move the 
cursor that way. “So what do you say to somebody like that?” Bruce Horn, one of the Macintosh 

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engineers, later said. “It made it clear to me that Gates was not the kind of person that would 
understand or appreciate the elegance of a Macintosh.”
Despite their mutual wariness, both teams were excited by the prospect that Microsoft would 
create graphical software for the Macintosh that would take personal computing into a new realm, 
and they went to dinner at a fancy restaurant to celebrate. Microsoft soon dedicated a large team to 
the task. “We had more people working on the Mac than he did,” Gates said. “He had about 
fourteen or fifteen people. We had like twenty people. We really bet our life on it.” And even 
though 
Jobs thought that they didn’t exhibit much taste, the Microsoft programmers were persistent. 
“They came out with applications that were terrible,” Jobs recalled, “but they kept at it and they 
made them better.” Eventually Jobs became so enamored of Excel that he made a secret bargain 
with Gates: If Microsoft would make Excel exclusively for the Macintosh for two years, and not 
make a version for IBM PCs, then Jobs would shut down his team working on a version of BASIC 
for the Macintosh and instead indefinitely license Microsoft’s BASIC. Gates smartly took the 
deal, which infuriated the Apple team whose project got canceled and gave Microsoft a lever in 
future negotiations.
For the time being, Gates and Jobs forged a bond. That summer they went to a conference 
hosted by the industry analyst Ben Rosen at a Playboy Club retreat in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, 
where nobody knew about the graphical interfaces that Apple was developing. “Everybody was 
acting like the IBM PC was everything, which was nice, but Steve and I were kind of smiling that, 
hey, we’ve got something,” Gates recalled. “And he’s kind of leaking, but nobody actually caught 
on.” Gates became a regular at Apple retreats. “I went to every luau,” said Gates. “I was part of 
the crew.”
Gates enjoyed his frequent visits to Cupertino, where he got to watch Jobs interact erratically 
with his employees and display his obsessions. “Steve was in his ultimate pied piper mode, 
proclaiming how the Mac will change the world and overworking people like mad, with incredible 
tensions and complex personal relationships.” Sometimes Jobs would begin on a high, then lapse 
into sharing his fears with Gates. “We’d go down Friday night, have dinner, and Steve would just 
be promoting that everything is great. Then the second day, without fail, he’d be kind of, ‘Oh shit, 
is this thing going to sell, oh God, I have to raise the price, I’m sorry I did that to you, and my 
team is a bunch of idiots.’”
Gates saw Jobs’s reality distortion field at play when the Xerox Star was launched. At a joint 
team dinner one Friday night, Jobs asked Gates how many Stars had been sold thus far. Gates said 
six hundred. The next day, in front of Gates and the whole team, Jobs said that three hundred Stars 
had been sold, forgetting that Gates had just told everyone it was actually six hundred. “So his 
whole team starts looking at me 
like, ‘Are you going to tell him that he’s full of shit?’” Gates recalled. “And in that case I didn’t 
take the bait.” On another occasion Jobs and his team were visiting Microsoft and having dinner at 
the Seattle Tennis Club. Jobs launched into a sermon about how the Macintosh and its software 
would be so easy to use that there would be no manuals. “It was like anybody who ever thought 
that there would be a manual for any Mac application was the greatest idiot,” said Gates. “And we 
were like, ‘Does he really mean it? Should we not tell him that we have people who are actually 
working on manuals?’”
After a while the relationship became bumpier. The original plan was to have some of the 
Microsoft applications—such as Excel, Chart, and File—carry the Apple logo and come bundled 
with the purchase of a Macintosh. “We were going to get $10 per app, per machine,” said Gates. 
But this arrangement upset competing software makers. In addition, it seemed that some of 
Microsoft’s programs might be late. So Jobs invoked a provision in his deal with Microsoft and 
decided not to bundle its software; Microsoft would have to scramble to distribute its software as 
products sold directly to consumers.
Gates went along without much complaint. He was already getting used to the fact that, as he 
put it, Jobs could “play fast and loose,” and he suspected that the unbundling would actually help 
Microsoft. “We could make more money selling our software separately,” Gates said. “It works 
better that way if you’re willing to think you’re going to have reasonable market share.” Microsoft 
ended up making its software for various other platforms, and it began to give priority to the IBM 

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PC version of Microsoft Word rather than the Macintosh version. In the end, Jobs’s decision to 
back out of the bundling deal hurt Apple more than it did Microsoft.
When Excel for the Macintosh was released, Jobs and Gates unveiled it together at a press 
dinner at New York’s Tavern on the Green. Asked if Microsoft would make a version of it for 
IBM PCs, Gates did not reveal the bargain he had made with Jobs but merely answered that “in 
time” that might happen. Jobs took the microphone. “I’m sure ‘in time’ we’ll all be dead,” he 
joked.