Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates
The secret of Apple, part two. The difference between Apple and Microsoft.
In the first part, The secret of Apple, we saw what differentiates Apple from any other company. This part shows the difference more precisely between the boss of Apple and Microsoft. In a third part we provide Quotations of Steve Jobs itself about his secret.
These quotations are from the memoirs of John Sculley, the man who fired Jobs from Apple in 1984. He himself was later replaced and the successor of his successor has been replaced by ... Steve Jobs!
John Sculley:
The thing that separated Steve Jobs from other people like Bill Gates — Bill was brilliant too — but Bill was never interested in great taste. He was always interested in being able to dominate a market.
Our comment: This comparison is the opinion of John Sculley, but looking at the story of two men and their companies, it seems perfectly correct.
Microsoft’s philosophy is to get it out there and fix it later. Steve would never do that. He doesn’t get anything out there until it is perfected.
Something that applies perfectly to the Vista system. We had to wait for Seven to get it working satisfactorily.
AppleTalk was brilliant in its day. It was another example of using a minimalist approach and solving a problem that no one else thought was a problem that needed to be solved.
The media tend to append the qualifier of visionary to entrepreneurs who succeed. Bill Gates was he a visionary? Not at the product level. But in the field of marketing, perhaps.
Steve was incredibly methodical.
This somewhat contradicts the image we could have of a fantastic but inventive character, feeding on only apples (at a time).
When he knows something is going to be important he tries to absorb as much as he possibly can.
This trend is the complement of the next, which is to control everything himself.
In each case, he always reached out for the very best people he could find in the field. And he personally did all the recruiting for his team. He never delegated that to anybody else.
"The way I like to work is where I touch everything."
Steve had a rule that there could never be more than one hundred people on the Mac team.
From this profile emerges the image of a dictator, but very different from Gates who wants to build an empire (which he seems to lose interest later), while Jobs built a company around it.
On one level he is working at the “change the world,” the big concept. At the other level he is working down at the details of what it takes to actually build a product and design the software, the hardware, the systems design and eventually the applications, the peripheral products that connect to it.
The Apple company, according to the quotations by Sculley, seems to be the personification of a person, a living being transformed into a great machine to produce objects and these objects are realizing his own dreams.
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