SOMEWHERE in the junkyard that I call my home office, there's an issue of Fortune magazine circa August 1991. On the cover are two of the most recognizable faces in the computer industry, even today: Microsoft's Bill Gates and Apple's Steve Jobs.
In the cover story, Gates, then only 35, and Jobs, 36, spoke of the future of the personal computer. To put things in perspective, Windows 95 was still four years away, and Jobs had been kicked out of Apple and struggling with his workstation company, Next. The iPod was still 10 years away. It was, as far as I can tell, the last time the two industry icons were interviewed together, until the All Things Digital 5 conference last May 30 – or some 15 years later – organized by the venerable Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal.
A copy of the session is available free as streaming video on the D5 site ( http://d5.allthingsd.com ) or as one whole MP4 file from the Apple iTunes store (almost 1 gigabyte). An audio file (83.3 megabytes) is more manageable. In any case, it's well worth listening to these industry pioneers talking about the past, present and future of computing.
The video is also an interesting study in contrast, not only between Gates and Jobs today, but between how they viewed the industry, then and now.
In 1991, the issue of competition – and Microsoft's domination of operating systems – was clearly on Jobs' mind. When the discussion turned to pen computing and the pioneering Go Corporation, Jobs predicted – correctly as history shows – that the company would be crushed. That prediction came true when the company closed in 1994 in the face of competition from Microsoft's Pen Services for Windows.
In 2007, however, an older Jobs talks of acceptance. "You know, we do not have a belief that the Mac is going to take over 80 percent of the PC market," Jobs says at one point. "You know, we're really happy when our market share goes up a point and we love that and we work real hard at it, but Apple's fundamentally a software company and there's not a lot of us left and Microsoft's one of them."
Curiously, 15 years after the Fortune Magazine interview, Gates is still talking about pen computing, calling himself an "unrepentant" believer in the tablet form factor.
"I think you'll have voice [activated commands]. I think you'll have ink. You'll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that," Gates says of the future tablet PC.
While Jobs expects computers to evolve and become more mobile, he also talks about an explosion of "post-PC" devices such as the iPod and iPhone, where people "are inventing things constantly."
Neither Gates nor Jobs, however, see an end to the general-purpose personal computer.
Unlike in 1991, if there were any animosity between the two, it did not show. In 2007, Gates and Jobs appeared like old friends, sharing reminiscences and the occasional jibe, but all in good humor.
"His mother likes him," Gates quips about the PC guy in Apple's now-famous "I'm a Mac" commercials that poke fun at Windows computers.
This was all entertaining and informative, but Mossberg, Swisher and the other participants who joined the short question-and-answer session afterwards, missed a great opportunity to ask Gates and Jobs about how they see free and open source software will affect the industry.
Mossberg may not see it yet – perhaps he has not installed a user-friendly Linux distribution such as Ubuntu – but there is a sea-change coming that will see more companies and individuals, especially in the developing world, choosing free and open source software over proprietary solutions such as those offered by Microsoft and Apple. It's a pity nobody in the conference thought of asking Gates and Jobs about it.
As you may expect, while both men are excellent communicators, it was Jobs who stuck a chord that resonated with his generation. Summing up his relationship with Gates, he quoted a 1969 tune entitled Two Of Us: "There's that one line in that one Beatles song, 'You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.' And that's clearly true here. "
