Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at the 2007 All Things Digital conference
Transcript
Machine transcript in the original language. It may contain errors. Select a timestamp to play that moment.
I have invited here today three industry experts to have a panel discussion on software.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, the Macintosh software dating game.
Welcome to the Macintosh software dating game.
Software CEOs, could I please ask you to introduce yourselves?
Hi, Fred Gibbons, President of Software Publishing Corporation.
Hi, I'm Mitch Kapoor, President of Lotus.
We do a product called 123.
My name is Bill Gates, I'm chairman of Microsoft, and during 1984, Microsoft expects to get
half of its revenues from Macintosh Software.
Software magnate number three, when was your first date with Macintosh?
We've been working with the Mac for almost two years now and we put some of our really
good people on it.
Software CEO number three, will Macintosh be the third industry standard?
Well, to create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different.
It takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination.
And the Macintosh of all the machines I've ever seen is the only one that meets that standard.
Software CEO number three, describe your ideal relationship with Apple.
Well, we'll be selling our software independently, so the key thing is that Apple gets a lot of consistent standard machines out there quickly.
Well, sorry, Steve. Time's up.
We'd like to give Steve a few moments to decide today's winner.
Okay, Steve, who's the winner?
Apples are red. IBM's blue.
if Mac's going to be the third milestone, I need all of you.
Now, I'd like to talk about meaningful partners.
Apple lives in an ecosystem.
And it needs help from other partners.
It needs to help other partners.
and relationships that are destructive
don't help anybody in this industry as it is today.
So during the last several weeks,
we have looked at some of the relationships
and one has stood out as a relationship
that hasn't been going so well
but had the potential, I think,
to be great for both companies.
The discussions actually began because there were some patent disputes.
And rather than...
I know.
Rather than repeating history, I'm extremely proud of both companies
that they have resolved these differences in a very, very professional way.
And I happen to have a special guest with me today via satellite downlink.
and if we could get him up on the stage right now.
Some of the most exciting work that I've done in my career
has been the...
work that I've done with Steve on the Macintosh. Whether it's the first
introduction or doing products like Mac Excel, these have been major milestones.
We're very excited about the new release we're building. This is called Mac
Office 98. We do expect to get it out by the end of this year and I think it's
going to really set a new benchmark for doing a good job with performance and
exploiting unique Mac features. In many ways it's more advanced than what we've
done on the Windows platform. We're also excited about Internet Explorer and
we've got a very dedicated team that's down in California that works on that
product and the code is really specially developed for the Macintosh. It's not
just a port of what we've done in the Windows environment. We look forward to
the feedback from all of you as we move forward doing more Macintosh software. Thanks.
The era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as
I'm concerned. This is about getting Apple healthy and this is about Apple being able to make
incredibly great contributions to the industry to get healthy and prosper again.
So thank you all for coming.
I look forward to hearing the grilling in the chair tonight and in the days to follow.
Thank you.
Why don't you sit here?
Well, thank you.
Before we get started, I think there were some pioneers.
Of course, we have the pioneers here on stage,
but there were some other really important pioneers
in the video we just saw,
and a couple of them are here in the audience.
So Mitch Kapoor, who is a regular at T,
could you just stand up and,
wherever you are, there he is.
And Fred Gibbons, who has not come to D before,
but is here tonight, Fred.
There's Fred.
Right there.
And I don't know if he's in the room,
but I do want to recognize our fellow journalist,
Brent Schlender from Fortune, who did the last,
to my knowledge, the last joint interview these guys did.
It was not on a stage, but it was a Fortune magazine interview.
Brent, I don't know if you're in the room, if you are.
Can you stand? Maybe he's...
Nope. Stay back there.
Over there.
So let's get started.
I wanted to ask, there's been a lot of like mano a mano cat fight kind of thing in a lot
of the blogs and the press and stuff like that.
And we wanted to, the first question I was interested in asking is what you think each
has contributed to the computer and technology industry, starting with you, Steve, for Bill
and vice versa.
Well, you know, Bill built the first software company in the industry.
And I think he built the first software company before anybody really in our industry knew
what a software company was, except for these guys.
And that was huge.
That was really huge.
And the business model that they ended up pursuing turned out to be the one that worked
really well for the industry.
So I think the biggest thing was Bill was really focused on software before almost anybody else had a clue that it was really the software.
That's what I see.
I mean, a lot of other things you could say, but that's the high order bit.
And I think building a company is really hard.
And it requires your greatest persuasive abilities to hire the best people you can and keep them at your company and keep them working, you know, doing the best work of their lives, hopefully.
And Bill's been able to stay with it for all these years.
Bill, how about the contribution of Steve and Apple?
Well, first I want to clarify, I'm not fake Steve Jobs.
What Steve's done is quite phenomenal.
If you look back to 1977, that Apple II computer, the idea that it would be a mass market machine,
the bet that was made there by Apple uniquely, there were other people with products, but
the idea that this could be an incredible empowering phenomena, Apple pursued that dream.
Then one of the most fun things we did was the Macintosh, and that was so risky.
People may not remember that Apple really bet the company.
Lisa hadn't done that well, and some people were saying, okay, that general approach wasn't
good, but the team that Steve built, even within the company, to pursue that, even
some days it felt a little ahead of its time.
I don't even remember that Twiggy
disc drive.
128K.
Ah, the Twiggy disc drive.
Steve gave a speech once, which is one of my favorites,
where he talked about, in a certain sense,