Gates and Jobs to Share A Stage

Rob wrote with a link to a Computer Business Review online article, which reports that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and Apple chief Steve Jobs will make a joint appearance at a future technologies conference in Carlsbad, California. The event is expected to last a little more than an hour, and the two computer industry magnates are expected to reflect on their pasts - while theorizing on the future. "[WSJ Tech columnist] Walt Mossberg, a co-producer of the conference who will interview the execs on-stage along with colleague Kara Swisher, said they simply invited Gates and Jobs to do the interview ... [Mossberg] declined to give any color about the questions he and Swisher are preparing, or any additional information. Most likely, Gates and Jobs will use the occasion to do some friendly sparring on their polar-opposite philosophies on personal computing. Jobs may bang on about the benefits of a software-hardware approach, while Gates may rattle off the joys of partnering with hardware partners."

Not what they say...

[paintswithcolour]

What will be interesting is how they come across, Gates has always struck me as lacking heavily in charisma; which just happens to be Jobs strong point. In fact, I'm suprised that Microsoft shuffle Gates out quite so much, apart from being a very notable computing figure he never seems to be a good promoter of tech.; partly because he brings out resentment in many people and partly because he sums up the typical mainstream concept of 'Geekness' and all the ideas of inaccessability that conjures up...

Jobs on the other hand is gives off (regardless of if it is true or not) a degree of approachability and dramatic flair (but, some would argue, at a hinderence of reality and pesky fact).

So I'm not going to be too interested in what they say, but how they say, and most interestingly of all how they play it against each other. Although I can't shake the feeling that they will be slapping each other on the back....

Too bad Steve doesn't seem to care about hardware

[antifoidulus]

anymore. The macbook was updated after 6 months without a product refresh(I don't consider adding an 8 core option to an otherwised unchanged mac pro a refresh, you could do that aftermarket before anyhow). And the previously updated model was the macbook as well. The mac mini is a joke, hasn't seen a real update in over a year, and there are rumors of its demise. The iMac, macbook pros, and mac pros are no longer price competitive with other manufacturers like they were when they first came out. I don't mind paying a little bit more, but this is just stupid. It just seems to me that Apple no longer cares about computers, they want to peddle ipods, overpriced phones, and crappy media center pc replacements. If Apple doesn't majorly ramp up its lines by WWDC, my powerbook G4 will be the last mac I own. I don't want to sit around and wait until Steve Jobs considers computers are important enought to start making good ones again.

Not Stallman - Shuttleworth!

[FishWithAHammer]

Of those three, Stallman is the only one that cares about anyone but himself.

Every time rms opens his mouth, he hurts the Free/Open Source Software (I don't care if he doesn't like the term) movement.

Mark Shuttleworth, please.

How Influential is Walter Mossberg?

[mpapet]

As someone that has done some DIY once-upon-a-time:

1. this would be considered a "win" for both companies. IMHO the Wall Street Journal and a mention by Walt Mossberg is the pinnacle of PR success. Literally, it doesn't get much higher than that in the U.S. anyway.

2. This is a perfect example of the power of the media. Bitter rivals? Not if Walt Mossberg asks you to come to his event.

3. Walt's not going to do anything to ruffle any feathers. Considering the audience, this will most likely be a snoozer for most ./'ers.

4. Linus _should_ be in Walt's media contacts list. Does Linus pay an _insane_ amount of money to PR hacks who bribe their way into Walt's assistant's office? That's kind of a pre-requisite.

The more things change...

[withoutfeathers]

Almost 25 years ago I was working as a programmer/analyst at Aetna Life & Casualty in Hartford CT. The company brought in Gates and Jobs for a one day seminar/meet-and-greet to help decide how seriously we should take the personal/desktop computer revolution. AL&C was at the time, of course, heavily into mainframe computing and barely looking at workgroup computing (System/38) let along personal computing.

The two gentlemen were cordial, but not particularly friendly toward each other and clearly had different visions of the future of corporate computing. Now here's the punchline: The big debate between the two was over the viability of COBOL. Jobs passionately prevailed on AL&C to drop the use of COBOL altogether (money quote: "Aetna is just about the only place left in the world that still uses COBOL, everyone else has migrated to C") while Gates was just as passionately (albeit not as charismatically) espousing the virtue of moving COBOL off of mainframes and on to the desktop.

Not a word from either of them about GUI or operating systems. Jobs was all about "new programming paradigms" and Gates was all about "the craft of programming" and how the broad range of Microsoft programming languages on PCs would accomodate that model. Gates was even promoting the idea that each programmer would have a wide range of programming languages at hand, using each one as appropriate for the task at hand like tools on a workbench. Of course, at the time, Microsoft's bread and butter was programming languages.

My, how times have changed!

Re:Too bad Steve doesn't seem to care about hardwa

[UnknowingFool]

Well, what updates do you have in mind? The Macs run the fastest processor available. They run 802.11n, have blue tooth, integrated camera, etc. Maybe they will work on a tablet someday but I suspect that will only happen when they finish the iPhone. Apple always take small but measured steps. Getting multi-touch screens to work is probably a first step in that direction.

Re:Too bad Steve doesn't seem to care about hardwa

[gig]

C'mon, man ... it is a few months until Leopard. These systems don't exist in a vacuum. You are looking right now at the very end of the end of the Intel transition. All of the machines pretend to be their immediate PowerPC predecessors in some way to minimize the fuss. The Intel transition is over and Leopard is coming that is going to mean new machines and probably a whole new model of some kind, like a very small notebook or something that fits between Mac mini and Mac Pro.

Also, the Mac Pro update to 8 processors was very significant because it is like Apple putting their multi-processing money where their mouths are. Big developers have these machines now and they are making their apps work better across 8 processors, which we will probably see in the iMac by 2010 or so. And there are going to be a lot of new Mac Pros purchased just to run Photoshop v10 which just came out. Photoshop is so interactive that a faster machine will be noticed immediately in work output ... none of those shops was going to buy a 4-way and pull the processors and put in some Intel part that has been found to be compatible by somebody "on the Internet."

The most interesting Mac hardware rumor for me is that they will have multi-touch screens, like the iPhone. Mac OS X Leopard has the same resolution-independent display from the iPhone, the menu bar or windows can all scale up if you have fat fingers or bad eyesight or both. If you look at Mac OS X Tiger on a 30 inch display, you don't want to push a mouse cursor around that thing, you just want to press icons in the Dock with your finger. You want to push mixer sliders around in Logic, or scrub video in Final Cut just by applying the fingers directly. This is also a feature that DJ's want to replace the turntables in an electronic setup, it is very hip. And it would make Mac users buy new Macs for Leopard and it would take 5 years to come to the PC in a real way. Look at all the stuff that is in iPhone for $500, why can't I get a touch screen on my $1200 iMac? Also it would enable them to make even smaller systems, such as a sub notebook with no track pad.