>jobs is a great showman but mediocre as a technical guy IMHO.
Of course, Woz was the technical guy. Anyway, Bill was always a mediocre programmer. There is no one at MS that is innovative. ALL of Gates ideas were 'borrowed' or bought from others, starting with QDOS (quick and dirty operating system -- really, this was the name! After Gates bought it, he dropped the 'Q' and changed dirty to disk).
For an entertaining history of the early days, read "Accidental Empires : How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date" amazon.com
My favorite Jobs quote (from the pbs special, not the book):
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely
no taste, and what that means is - I don't mean that in a small way I mean that in
a big way. In the sense that they they don't think of original ideas and they don't
bring much culture into their product ehm and you say why is that important -
well you know proportionally spaced fonts come from type setting and beautiful
books, that's where one gets the idea - if it weren't for the Mac they would
never have that in their products and ehm so I guess I am saddened, not by
Microsoft's success - I have no problem with their success, they've earned their
success for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make
really third rate products." -- Steve Jobs |
