“Bill Gates today ruled out ever returning to the helm of Microsoft and dismissed harsh barbs by his former arch-rival Steve Jobs,” Tim Lester and Asher Moses report for The Sydney Morning Herald.
“Gates said he had made the transition to work full-time at his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ‘and that will be what I do the rest of my life,'” Lester and Moses report. “Steve Ballmer, who has been Microsoft’s CEO since taking over from Gates in 2000, is widely considered to have missed the significance of what Jobs dubbed the ‘post-PC era’ and Microsoft is now an also-ran in smartphones, tablets and music players… [Gates] may be just as culpable as Ballmer for missing the new era in computing as he has been quoted questioning the viability of Apple devices like the iPod and iPad.”
Lester and Moses report, “‘Our work at Microsoft was super successful for all good reasons but Steve made huge contributions and he actually in his last few years was a lot kinder than that but over the years he did say some tough things,’ Gates said today.”
MacDailyNews Take: “Super successful for all good reasons?” Now, there’s a serious attempt, however poor it may be, at “reality distortion.”
Lester and Moses report, “Gates has previously said of Apple’s closed model: ‘The integrated approach works well when Steve is at the helm. But it doesn’t mean it will win many rounds in the future.’ Jobs said of Gates’s open model: ‘Of course his fragmented model worked, but it didn’t make really great products. It produced crappy products.’ But Jobs’s harshest barbs came during an interview with his biographer, Walter Isaacson. ‘Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology,’ Jobs told Isaacson. ‘He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas’ … ‘They just ripped us off completely, because Gates has no shame,’ Jobs said in the biography, to which Gates replied ‘if he believes that, he really has entered into one of his own reality distortion fields.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Gates knows there’s no bad contract giving Microsoft unfettered access to shamelessly rip off Apple’s iOS like Microsoft did with the Mac, so he’ll stay out. He ran away and hid and left a clueless salesbozo on the bridge to run the ship aground. Bill Gates always was a man of weak character; a common thief, forever lying to himself, proclaiming to all that he never stole a thing. That stairway you’re trying to build to heaven would end better, Bill, if you’d just come clean.
