“When I put the accompanying quotes side by side…”
You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give them that. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new. – Steve Jobs
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. – Bill Gates
“…my first thought was that Bill Gates’s greatest source of learning is Steve Jobs, and my second thought was that Bill Gates might have more frustrated, disheartened, or enraged customers than any executive in the history of the planet,” Dale Dauten writes for The Boston Globe.
“Indeed, searching out ‘the most unhappy’ Gates customers would be risky business, as I’ve seen people using Microsoft products who seem as though they would gladly take Bill Gates out to a field and take baseball bats to him, like the scene with the printer in the movie ‘Office Space,'” Dauten writes.
Dauten writes, “Here’s a question: Who would you rather be, Bill or Steve? Richest man in the world, or the guy who created the Apple computer, Pixar Studios, and iPod/iTunes? Here’s a more general question: Would you rather be the farmer or the explorer?”
Full article here.
Related article:
Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ ultimate goal: ‘to take back the computer business from Microsoft’ – June 16, 2005
I’d rather be myself with the wealth of Bill Gates and Job’s job.
Dean Martin.
you can always buy what the guys make.
you can only rent what the girls shake….
Both of them are seriously flawed people. They are hard on those around them, egocentric, and getting older without ever growing up.
Forced to make such a choice … Jobs, at least, is neither boring nor ethically bankrupt.
I’d rather be El Jobso and he’s not exactly a pauper in the money stakes anyway.
Explorer, thank you.
Steve purchased Pixar, he didn’t create it.
PS– I’m fine being me, thank you.
what a silly question.
would you chose 4 billion or 60 billion $$$$?
i like Jobs, but he’s a tightwad with those $$$$$. Gates is donating billions.
C’mon Joell. The question is not whether you’d rather have $4b or $60b. With either of those amounts, you’ll never run out of money. I think that’s what the author is trying to get at: When you have enough money that you’ll never run out, which would be more important to you – more money, or being involved in something that is really cool?
Pixar as we know it was not purchased– it was created largely after Steve Jobs bought it. He also wagered the majority of his personal fortune over many years before ever seeing a $ in profit. WHat Lucas started was the seed, but Pixar as a studio was the vision of Lassiter, Catmull & Jobs.
Steve purchase Pixar for $5 Million and built it into a 7.4 Billion dollar company!
Take the money and bifriend Jobs
i’d rather be a pirate than a putz
While I hate Gates’ products, I love his philanthropy… I think that is something “really cool” to be involved in.
Dauten writes: “Here’s a more general question: Would you rather be the farmer or the explorer?”
I would change “the farmer” to “the strip miner”. Mining away people’s time and money resources without regard or any sense of consequences.
philanthropy-
How do you know what Jobs does on the side? He’s not parading around looking for a merit badge every other week. . . All the great robber baron/ bastards of history have donated huge sums while standing on the head of the common man- Carnegie, Rockafella, et al. They were looking to buy some sort of legacy, a better image for themselves. So folks remember how they founded some college, of bulit a library, but not how they crushed competition by any means available.
If the richest man in the world was not a philanthropist, then he would be seen as satan.. It’s easy to be a philanthropist with 60 billion to your name.
Now Mother Teresa was a true philanthropist, she gave more than she had… Gates does so out of necessitiy, his donations will never even beign to affect his bottom line.
If I became the richest man in the world by stealing the Mac’s GUI (what creativity and vision!) and then criminally leveraging it to create a monopoly, I’d be a philanthropist, too.
…to try to get rid of the stench of all that bad karma. Gates will burn in hell in the end.
I wanna be Jonathan Ive — that man is a brilliant designer!!!
What a fantastic article.
The ‘Age of Gates adn Windows, is coming to an end…
(except at the BBC who think it is just beginning.. Idiots).
I think I’m with you iSteve. Gates giving away the interest on his misgotten pile of money does not make him a Mother Teresa. It makes him someone who wishes to assuage his guilt.
Now if he gave it ALL away and then devoted his life to caring for people in a leprosy colony, I might begin to think he may yet have a place in heaven.
So its clear, that’s not where he’s going!
Let’s see…would I rather be helping the world with issues of education or disease or would I rather be flogging mp3 players…Mr. Jobs will be remembered as a great technology salesman, Mr Gates will be remembered for his charitable work around the world.
I’d like to be Salma Hayek for a month. Then, nothing else would really matter.
I’d rather be Steve Ballmer for five minutes so I could beat myself to death with a chair.
I think it was a photocopier that they took out to the field and smashed up in “Office Space” – not a printer.
“Uh-oh. Sounds like somebody’s got a case of the Mondays.”