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Bill Gates Shares His Memories of Steve Jobs (cnbc.com) 155

Posted by EditorDavid from the reminiscing dept.
BGR reports: Bill Gates would like you to know that the reason his late rival was able to resuscitate Apple and take the iPhone maker from near-death to being the most valuable company in the world is that Steve Jobs was so successful at making people believe in an idea. Or, as Gates puts it, that Jobs was so good at "casting spells...." In a segment set to be broadcast on Sunday during the CNN program Fareed Zakaria GPS, that's how Gates will explain why he thinks Steve was able to do what he did and engineer one of the greatest business success stories of all time. And why Gates was able to see through it all, even though he admits couldn't recreate the magic to the same degree...

It's not a sugar-coated walk down memory lane he shares either, acknowledging that Jobs was sometimes an "asshole."
CNBC shares more of Gates' remarks: Jobs, the former Apple CEO who died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, was an example of "don't do this at home" in his style of leadership, Gates said. While it's really easy to imitate the bad parts of Steve, Gates said, "I have yet to meet any person who in terms of picking talent, hyper-motivating that talent," who could match him. "He brought some incredibly positive things along with that toughness."

Jobs was a singular case, Gates said, where Apple was on a path to die and goes on to become the most valuable company in the world. There aren't going to be many stories like that, he said.
Gates' remarks were part of a longer podcast -- available free online at Apple.com -- about "How to Lead." It also includes remarks from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, 79-year-old civil rights activist John Lewis, and retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal.
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Bill Gates Shares His Memories of Steve Jobs More

Bill Gates Shares His Memories of Steve Jobs

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  • Yes, Jobs has been a benefactor to civilization... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 07, 2019 @08:44PM (#58888162)

    In the 1800s, even the union busting robber barons and trust owners like Carnegie, Frick, and others left legacies. Frick left hospitals, Carnegie left arts funds, concert halls, and scholarships.

    What have this generation of CEOs given back in general? Jobs has no schools, concert halls, or anything else as a legacy. He left $0 for charity. Instead, his legacy is his iYacht where he screwed over the shipwright.

    Sorry, but making cool products is going to be forgotten in a few years. The fact that he only cared for himself and himself only will be how he will be remembered in the history books, similar to the people who ran the East India Company. Had Jobs actually bothered to leave something behind, give 20-50 more years, he actually will be remembered.

    • Jobs has no schools, concert halls, or anything else as a legacy.

      Since Apple is the only large company fighting for, not against, customer privacy, I would argue Jobs left a lot better legacy than a library (which no-one uses anymore).

      A concert hall serves a city. Apple serves the world.

      Jobs had a great point about charity - how do you really measure if it's doing any good? Bill Gates is known far and wide for large charity works, yet what has truly improved because of his efforts? The whole charity givi

      • Maybe you should read up on how many millions of life's the Gates foundation has saved. Your comment does not seem to take into account the impact Melinda and Bill are having at all.

        • No links I see as to what good you imagine they have done. Looks like it is you who needs to do some reading [independent.co.uk].

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            No links I see as to what good you imagine they have done. Looks like it is you who needs to do some reading [independent.co.uk].

            You really are a coward. Jobs was/is human shit as a person.

            https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/sep/01/daughter-steve-jobs-denied-lisa-brennan-jobs

            Though I guess that applies to you too. You really are human feces given flesh.

            • He was a sociopath, or possibly psychopath (I don't know if anyone's ever done a proper PCL-R assessment of him, but he's got most of the traits). That's what made him such an incredibly effective persuader, but also what made him an asshole. If you were prepared to deal with that it'd probably be a good place to be when your boss can persuade people that black is white, but I don't know how long I'd be able to work for him.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

            Looks like it is you who needs to do some reading.

            SuperKendall citing a report by Global Justice Now [wikipedia.org] with approval. Now I've seen everything.

          • Re: Jobs gave the world Apple (Score:4, Informative)

            by pgmrdlm ( 1642279 ) on Monday July 08, 2019 @08:55AM (#58889812) Journal
            https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/20/3-ways-bill-gates-is-spending-billions-to-change-the-world.html/ [cnbc.com]

            Education
            Over the next five years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation plans to invest $1.7 billion in U.S. public education. The tech billionaire shared how he and his wife plan to spend this money at the Council of the Great City Schools in October.

            Climate Change Roughly a year ago, Gates launched clean-energy investment fun, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, with the help of other famous billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Jack Ma. Gates serves as the co-chair of the board with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
            Under his leadership, Gates is using the $1 billion fund to invest in promising but underfunded technologies that could help humans âoeadapt to the climate change that is already affecting the planet, and develop new tools that will keep the problem from getting worse.â

            Global health The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spends millions promoting global health initiatives around the world. In 2016, the foundation raised nearly $13 billion to eradicate AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.


            https://www.betterworldinternational.org/influencers/bill-gates-changing-world// [betterworl...tional.org]

        • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

          Maybe you should read up on how the Gates foundation is killing people [latimes.com]. After that article came out, the foundation put a press release up on their website which said that they would be reviewing the ethical impact of their investments. That stayed up only one day. They took it down and replaced it with a message about how they would not do that because it was too hard.

          Microsoft was found by the USDoJ to have abused its monopoly position in the market in basically every way possible, damaging their competit

      • Re:Jobs gave the world Apple (Score:5, Interesting)

        by DRJlaw ( 946416 ) on Sunday July 07, 2019 @10:37PM (#58888422)

        Since Apple is the only large company fighting for, not against, customer privacy, I would argue Jobs left a lot better legacy than a library (which no-one uses anymore).

        So the 33% increase in library visits from 2001-10 was from 0 to 0? Or from ~1.15 billion to ~1.5 billion per year [infodocket.com]? Those pesky millenials [pewresearch.org] gone done and screwed up your theory.

        A concert hall serves a city. Apple serves the world.

        Well, that's a rather limited view of the impact of a concert hall [wikipedia.org]. Also, we're not talking about Apple. We're talking about Jobs' lack of philanthropy. If you prefer to discuss Apple, we can discuss the price of entry into Apple's legacy.

        Jobs had a great point about charity - how do you really measure if it's doing any good?

        Nobody's thought of that before [givewell.org].

        Bill Gates is known far and wide for large charity works, yet what has truly improved because of his efforts?

        Global public health [adweek.com], for one.

        The whole charity giving thing needs to be re-worked to make a real impact. Currently most large scale charitable giving is really just benefiting the people that work at a particular charity, what good is that?

        Oh look, a fact-free conclusion. Surely it must be correct.

        • Gen X, but the internet has definitely decreased my trips to the city's public library, but increased my trips to the University library.

          It is just so easy to get started down a path that may eventually require a substantive treatment to understand. And the internet rarely has that. It has all the details, but they're spread out and often polluted.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Gates charity does not absolve him from the evils that he used to acquire his wealth. Microsoft, under Bill's leadership, held the world back 20 years. he ruined lives and squashed advances that everyone would have benefited from.

          • Huh? That's a really broad accusation to make without any specific details. Evils? Held the world back 20 years? Ruined lives and squashed advances the everyone would have benefited from? I mean are we talking about firing Ed from Development 1 month before his stock options vested? Or did he destroy research that would have developed cold fusion?

            Please clarify the scandal you're implying.

      • Also, they are only counting his deeds before his eventual return.

      • A concert hall serves a city. Apple serves the world.

        Apple doesn't serve the world. Apple serves its shareholders. It has been very good as doing so, to the detriment of the world we live in.

        Apple pretty much created the walled garden. Not that it didn't exist before, but Apple made it the new normal. Same thing for vendor lock-in. And to a certain extent, programmed obsolescence and non-repairable devices.
        Without Apple, we might still have removable batteries and the environment would be in a better position.

    • He donated privately.

    • Right. Dead Steve Jobs legacy: the world's ugliest yacht. [twitter.com]

  • Reality distortion field (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday July 07, 2019 @08:49PM (#58888180)

    Steve Jobs ability to mesmerize people with his ideas was often described as a reality distortion field [wikipedia.org].

    • Yeah, psychopaths and narcissists are known for their superficial charm. [wikipedia.org]

      • "If I think something's a waste of time or inappropriate I don't wait to point it out. I say it right away. It's real time. So you might hear me say 'That's the dumbest idea I have ever heard' many times during a meeting." -- Steve Jobs
  • Steve Jobs was to Bill Gates as Starscream is to Megatron.

  • Mac, iphone, ipad, apple TV and the watch are still based on NeXT OS that SJ helped create and turned into OS X

    • Except they shit all over it. They fucked up the dock. They fucked up the display, display ps became display PDF and stuck around, but osx uses it less than next did. They bloated it beyond all recognition, too. NeXTStep was relatively peppy on a 25 MHz 68040 (I never used anything slower than a turbo slab) but osx is a turd all day, it's laggy AF.

      Everything Apple touches turns into a polished turd. The one thing they really hit out of the park was the iPod, and even that required using iTunes, which is gen

  • people like to worship SJ but he was like another Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan's GM beat him a long time ago. Same thing with Apple. Android was kicking their ass and earnings growth was slowing or dropping.

    They were making small screen phones when large screens were becoming popular and it took Tim Cook's apple to make a big screen iphone because SJ hated them.

    SJ hated the ipad mini until his execs had to convince him.

    IOS was crap until Tim Cook reorganized apple and put all software development under one p

    • Re:Tim Cook saved apple a second time (Score:4, Insightful)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday July 07, 2019 @09:41PM (#58888302) Journal

      IOS was crap until Tim Cook reorganized apple and put all software development under one person. Before that they were organized by products and shared some software. After the reorg the quality and features of IOS and OS X improved and they began to work together really well.

      What on earth are you talking about?

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You've got some strange world view going on there buddy.

      Tim Cook is driving Apple into unimportance and mediocrity. When Steve Jobs was at the helm, everyone sat up and listened when he had a new product announcement because he really had stunningly new products.

      Everything Tim Cook has been doing is just coasting -- we haven't had any truly innovative new products from Apple ever since Cook took over. At worst, we've had new product regressions -- like the faulty butterfly keyboards, sky high prices, and l

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday July 07, 2019 @09:18PM (#58888260)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • So Bill Gates thinks Jobs was a bit of an asshole but who was charismatic?

      Two movies to watch to explain this:

      I Remember Mama [wikipedia.org]

      . . . and . . .

      I Dismember Mama [wikipedia.org]

    • Woah, woah! (Score:4, Funny)

      by tgibson ( 131396 ) on Monday July 08, 2019 @12:53AM (#58888768) Homepage

      It's not so much Gates thinking that that gets me, it's that anyone thought it newsworthy. What's next? "Steve Wozniak is a really great hacker", "Richard Stallman has some intense views, but seems to be proven right more times than not", "Donald Trump's a bit of a fraud, but he knows how to get elected", "Breaking Bad was a really good TV show", "Have you seen that Star Wars thing? It's pretty cool", "Call me old fashioned, but I like coffee, it really helps wake me up in the morning", "I find relaxing on the beach a particularly effective way to relieve stress", "I went shoe shopping last week, and I bought an 11 wide instead of an 11, and you know, it felt way more comfortable than my usual shoes.", "I had Fruity Pebbles for breakfast this morning, not my usual, but we were out of bagels."

      It's like reading an entire front page of headlines at Slashdot.

    • "Richard Stallman has some intense views, but seems to be proven right more times than not"

      Actually, I'd love to see that headline reported on a regular basis.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sad_ ( 7868 )

      So Bill Gates thinks Jobs was a bit of an asshole but who was charismatic?

      And Gates is a bit of an asshole and has no charisma.

      ok, to be fair, since he's been 'retired' it appears the asshole level of gates has decreased somewhat.

  • Many great leaders are A-holes (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    From Alexander the Great to Rockefeller, Edison, Ford, and Steve Jobs a lot of great leaders were huge jerks if they were not also so successful. It requires a certain amount of unjustified narcissism to turn into eventually justified narcissism. There are a lot of guys like that who are not successful also, they are just ordinary jerks.

    • the guy just never got punched in the nose yet... thats how men stop being assholes. :)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by thomst ( 1640045 )

        wolfheart111 opined:

        the guy just never got punched in the nose yet... thats how men stop being assholes. :)

        Mmm ... no.

        Getting punched in the snoot is how men (and boys) stop being bullies. Assholes are a whole different category of misanthrope. They punch back, for instance.

        And they don't hesitate to fight dirty ...

    • There's a lot of successful non-narcissists also, such as Warren Buffett.

      Gates should be included in the Jerk List. He's not known for his people skills among staff. I wouldn't call Gates a "narcissist", but he has been known to be quite impatient with staff at times. Granted, if I had his power, my bad habits would probably be magnified also.

  • Bill Gates is full of shit ! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 07, 2019 @09:46PM (#58888314)

    From TFA:

    ... Steve Jobs was so successful at making people believe in an idea. Or, as Gates puts it, that Jobs was so good at "casting spells..."

    I knew Steve Jobs.

    I was one of his OEMs way back the Apple ][ days.

    Jobs was one heck of a very convincing dude. He was super-convincing not because of his ability of 'casting spells', but because Mr. Steve Jobs has full believe in his own vision, and when he shared his vision with others that he believed so thoroughly, people around Jobs can't help but be influenced.

    Bill Gates is full of shit.

    When Steve Jobs was alive, there was not a single praise of Steve Jobs uttered from Bill Gates' mouth.

    As weird as Jobs was, there were times Steve Jobs admitted to us what MS had done right and his Apple has failed.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Locutus ( 9039 )
      As Microsoft loses it luster and people realize they are not leaders, Bill Gates starts making public appearances talking about Microsoft and their place in the market.
      Gates is a protectionist and always has been. So yes, full of shit once again.

      LoB

    • "Jobs was one heck of a very convincing dude. He was super-convincing not because of his ability of 'casting spells', but because Mr. Steve Jobs has full believe in his own vision, and when he shared his vision with others that he believed so thoroughly, people around Jobs can't help but be influenced."

      I think Gates is an asshole, but it's obvious to most English speakers that this is exactly the kind of thing that Gates was talking about. He obviously didn't mean jobs was using magical incantations, or sac

    • He's been doing it a lot lately. I sense a new memoir in the pipe! I hope he's drinking lots of prune juice, because his storytelling is really dry.

  • I never liked Jobs (Score:1, Insightful)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 )

    I don't understand people who were under Steve Jobs spell, I never liked the guy, he always reminded me of a used car salesman, a sleek manager, clearly a difficult person to deal with, I don't understand what people were so mesmerised by. What I think he was doing well, he predicted the reactions of his target audience, he knew who he was selling to and so he understood what his customers wanted to see in a product. That's a useful trait in a director of-course.

  • Apple (indirectly) helped Linux (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ikhider ( 2837593 ) on Monday July 08, 2019 @02:47AM (#58888936)
    It is because of Apple that USB devices, like drawing tablets, external sound cards and DVD drives do not need drivers. citation: https://artmusictech.libsyn.co... [libsyn.com] In the earlier days, that was not the case. Also, Steve Jobs helped push Adobe Flash further to the wayside, though it still has not died, yet. citation: https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com] Those are two positive moves for humanity. I prefer Stallman's take on Jobs, "Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died. As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing. Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective." Free as in Freedom!
    • What the hell is this over-the-top rambling? "Fools from their freedom" or "a jail made cool." You do realize that like 90% of the market doesn't give a fuck about your supposed "freedom". They don't care about source code. They don't care about Free as in Beer or Free as in Muh Freedum. They care that when they turn on the computer it can load a web browser, some applications, and do so easily. They care, if they're commercial, that when something breaks they can call a phone number or take it to a store a

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        We already know that most people are fools, but the few that are not do not enjoy being dragged down with the rest.

        • Fools, because the computer is not an obsession or even an important focus in a person's life? That it's simply a tool for work or for checking emails, social media, buying shit online, or playing video games for the vast majority of people? People who think like you must be experts in the medical profession, cooking, socializing, athletics, farming, gardening, ranching, automotive mechanics and engineering, oil production, cleaning water, and just about every other conceivable thing out there. The fact is

      • iOS is the UNIX Apple/Jobs *wanted* - one where you're not allowed to install apps from people with different political views than Apple's board room.

        OSX embraced open source to get it out of insolvency, then Apple turned on its contributors as soon as it could afford to.

        It reminds me of hanging out at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab in high school days with Mac IIfx machines everywhere despite the "No Nuclear End Use" EULA. Except now Apple can enforce its politics with solid DRM. Some of us are incapab

        • Again - the vast majority of people on iOS don't give a shit about this "wall" you seem so concerned about. Most people aren't defined by the apps they can/cannot install on their iOS devices. Be it some right wing "I hate blacks" app or whatever Nazi/InfoWars type shit is out there.

          Nothing else you rambled about bears anything to this discussion. We get it "HURR HATE ON APPLE HURR HATE ON JOBS HURR HURR HURR". If you live to define yourself by what other people/companies do, I tend to take the view you

          • No discomfort at all. You're in a historically-free country because a few people were willing to be philosophically unrelenting on freedom and willing to die for it. It's well known that most people *aren't* and that's how tyranny encroaches (e.g. Weimar Republic). See also Stanley Milgram's experiments, which confirms the moral complacency of the majority.

            Yeah, most people just "go along" and that's how 180 million people wound up murdered in the twentieth century. The standard go-along'er response to

            • Jesus christ...are you really correlating/comparing a person's choice of smartphones with shit like genocide!? It's a smartphone, calm the fuck down. People want ease of use...that's what the consumer wants. You seem all bent out of shape because people don't want to spend hours compiling a kernel (but only after checking the code line by line to ensure it's really "free", because if you're using precompiled binaries you've just tossed out any benefit of open source in regards to trust/security/privacy) on

    • You presented a podcast as a citation? Get the fuck out of here immediately.

      Most USB devices which are not input or mass storage devices still need drivers, including tablets (ones worth using anyway) and audio devices. You are so far from knowing what you're talking about that you might as well be on a different site. So please go there.

  • hmmm.. (Score:1, Troll)

    by SuperDre ( 982372 )
    Just watch 'Pirates of silicon valley' and you get a much better picture of the asshole Steve Jobs really was. He has never designed or created anything original at all, but he was good at stealing other peoples work and polishing it.. In the end he could even sell a turd to all those Apple fans..

    • Just watch 'Pirates of silicon valley' and you get a much better picture of the asshole Steve Jobs really was. He has never designed or created anything original at all, but he was good at stealing other peoples work and polishing it.. In the end he could even sell a turd to all those Apple fans..

      If nobody is allowed to take somebody else's badly implemented but generally good idea and coming up with a better implementation because: 'that's stealing' all innovation would grind to a halt.

    • You can't steal an idea by copying it any more than you can steal a song by copying an MP3.

      Jobs' worthwhile contributions lay in driving his team, and in not accepting excuses. The latter of those tendencies ended well before his death - "you're holding it wrong" etc. Today Apple is notable primarily for how little it listens to its [potential] customers, and how much some people will pay to belong to the cult of shiny.

  • Of course Apple made sure thet their podcasts can only be listened to on their own crappy podcasts app on the iDevices.

  • Jobs was a brilliant marketer, yes, but his true innovation was how he managed the engineers. Gates and Ballmer were old-school self-centered managers, they had "vision" and directed others to implement it. Innovation was stamped out if it conflicted with the "vision". Jobs was much smarter. Rather than set a vision that stamps out the innovation of the smart people around him, he raised up those engineers who had ideas and made them prepare demonstrations and examples and if it seemed like it made his

    • That sounds about right to me, with one caveat: Gates was good in knowing what businesses want, where the rules are more narrowly defined. Jobs was good at knowing what consumers (would) want, where anything goes. Jobs' approach maybe wouldn't have worked for businesses.

      What's interesting is that Gates apparently still wishes he had the ability to create something people would love.

  • Steve Jobs was a perfectionist and often had trouble making simple decisions https://www.cultofmac.com/1258... [cultofmac.com]

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