Gates Gets It Right About Steve Jobs, Microsoft (Premium)

In an interview with CNN this past weekend, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates looked back on Steve Jobs, a sometime collaborator and a sometime competitor. And unlike the recent interview in which he incorrectly called Android his biggest mistake, this time he got it right.

“Next completely failed, it was such nonsense, and yet he mesmerized those people,” Gates said of the company Steve Jobs founded after leaving Apple in the mid-1980s.

He’s right: Jobs ran Next into the ground and that business was a failure. It was, however, saved by a dying Apple, which needed a more modern base for its next Mac operating system. And then Jobs came back to Apple, took over as CEO, and engineered the biggest turnaround in business history.

Gates addresses a number of things related to Jobs, including his so-called “reality distortion field,” which Gates said never affected him.

“I was like a minor wizard because he would be casting spells, and I would see people mesmerized, but because I’m a minor wizard, the spells don’t work on me,” Gates said, in perhaps the most awkward possible way of saying that. Here, too, he was correct: When asked whether he would develop software for Jobs’ Next computer, Gates said (and I quote),” Develop for it? I’ll piss on it.”

But Jobs was, of course, a motivating technology innovator. And Gates’ assessment of what Jobs got right is, again, correct.

“I have yet to meet any person who [could rival Jobs] in terms of picking talent, hyper-motivating that talent, and having a sense of design of, ‘Oh, this is good. This is not good,’ he said.

Jobs, too, was terrible to virtually everyone he’d ever met, including members of his own family. That falls under my theory about geniuses, or anyone who is a bit too good at any one thing: They suffer elsewhere. Gates calls Jobs an “asshole,” correctly, and explains that it’s easy to “imitate the bad parts of Steve,” as countless people have tried, from Steven Sinofsky to Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes. “But “he brought some incredibly positive things along with that toughness,” Gates added. Correct.

But what I like the most about this interview is that Gates seems to have taken my criticism of his last interview to heart. As you may recall, Gates said that his biggest mistake at Microsoft was not creating Android. But as I noted in No, Bill. No (Premium), that’s nonsense. Bill Gates’ biggest mistake was creating a culture in which the firm would never innovate, but would instead copy the best ideas and then illegally push those the businesses that did create those ideas right out of the market.

“The problem with Microsoft … is that the company’s early history is tainted,” I wrote. “And it’s tainted because of Bill Gates and his lack of ethics and empathy, his inability to innovate, and the culture he infused into the company he created. Microsoft today is trying to shake all that off. But it came to power because Gates was a ruthless businessman, not because it had the best technology. And when his innate ability to be ruthless was stripped away from him because of the antitrust issues his business practices created, Microsoft stumbled, lost a decade, and its competitors surged. And that, folks, is Bill Gates’ biggest mistake.”

In the CNN interview, Gates seems to come around to this viewpoint.

“Reflecting on the culture he created in the 1970s as Microsoft co-founder, Gates said the company in its early days had ‘a self-selected set of people who were mostly males, I’ll admit, and yes we were pretty tough on each other,” a Bloomberg early peek at the CNN interview explains. “’And I think sometimes that went too far’.”

Sometimes.

OK, well, you gotta start somewhere.

The good news? Today, Gates is a philanthropist who has pledged to give away the vast majority of his ill-gotten fortune, and he’s “not pushing quite as insanely” as he did in his Microsoft heyday. I hope he’s successful. But when I look back at Microsoft under his leadership, as I’ve been doing nearly non-stop since I started writing my Programming Windows series, I find myself confronting anew everything that I despised about Gates and Microsoft in the early days.

Apparently, Gates is now confronting this too. And that is both correct and a good thing.