This was the first of many visits I would make over the next ten years, and Steve made a point of having me, the photographer George Lange, and his assistant come to this kitchen door, which was indeed standing wide open on this warm day. The guest of honor apparently didn’t get the word to use this entrance, or else he simply forgot. He arrived about fifteen minutes after the appointed time, and used the big knocker on the front door to let us know he had arrived. Steve and I went to greet him, and Bill Gates waved to the driver of his black limo to leave. We all shook hands and went inside.
The house was a fraction of the size of the Jackling Mansion in Woodside, and just as sparsely furnished, at least at that point. The living room had a half dozen or so framed prints by Ansel Adams leaning against the walls, yet to be hung. An audiophile-quality stereo system in a vertical rack had been set up with a couple of speaker towers carefully placed along one wall, and about a hundred LPs sat on the floor, some in a box and others loosely propped near the stereo.
The only seats were two classic Eames lounge chairs with footstools. Bill and Steve sat in the chairs, and I sat on an ottoman. Bill occasionally would move to the other ottoman or get up and pace a little, while Steve, who was barefoot, remained seated with his legs curled up underneath him for most of the session. George roamed the room freely, snapping pictures as the two men talked.
The occasion: the first of only two formal joint interviews that the pair would ever grant. (The latter would take place sixteen years later, onstage at a high-tech business conference.) I had arranged the meeting as the key element of a package of cover stories in Fortune to commemorate the tenth anniversary of IBM’s shipment of its first PC, and to contemplate the future of the young industry. It had been relatively easy to get Bill to buy in to the idea of the interview. Indeed, he was willing to interrupt a beach vacation with his friend Ann Winblad, a fellow coder from Minnesota, who was now a venture capitalist. Like Bill, she too enjoyed taking a stack of thick books along so they could read and discuss them. Bill had begun dating Melinda French, his future wife, several years before, but even after their romance blossomed, he let her know that he planned to continue to take his “think week” vacations with Winblad.
Steve, on the other hand, had played hard to get. Unlike Gates, he insisted on setting certain parameters for the get-together, primarily that it occur on his turf. Bill would have to come to his house in Palo Alto, and only on this particular Sunday. The interview violated what had become Steve’s basic criteria for publicity—he would only put himself out for stories that promoted his company’s products. If I was going to get this kind of exclusive, unfettered access on an occasion where he had nothing to sell, it was damn well going to be on his terms.
THE CAREERS OF Bill Gates and Steve Jobs intertwine in ways that illuminate the entire history of the personal computer industry—and that help explain why Steve was so unsuccessful at NeXT, and, more important, why he was able to succeed so brilliantly upon his return to Apple. While Fortune would cast the interview as a retrospective, it turned mostly into a discussion that forecast the directions in which the two men would eventually take the world of computing. Bill and Steve were two very different people with two very different approaches to computing, approaches that perfectly suited and reflected their personalities. Fortune was right to recognize them as cofounders of the PC revolution, but in 1991 it would have been a stretch to predict that these same two men would shape the industry for yet another two decades. But that’s how it turned out: for thirty-five years, from the creation of the Apple II until Steve’s death in 2011, their differing philosophies helped determine the design and purpose and marketing of everything from smartphones and iPods, to the cheapest laptops and desktop machines, to the massive mainframe computers that drove the productivity of Fortune 500 companies.
By 1991, their differences had placed the two thirty-somethings (Steve, then thirty-six, was eight months older than Bill) on opposite trajectories. Quite simply, Steve’s career had been spiraling downward, while Bill’s was soaring to unseen levels. One simple proof of Bill’s rising power: For this interview reviewing the decade since the shipment of the first IBM PC, Fortune hadn’t even considered inviting someone from IBM. That’s because Gates had neutered Big Blue even before the company manufactured its first personal computer, when he convinced them to license his operating system, MS-DOS, without an exclusivity clause. That brilliant gambit meant that by 1991 it was Gates, not IBM, who held the keys to the industry’s future.
Bill’s end run around IBM hinged on the fact that he had understood something IBM had not: that the software IBM was looking for—that is, an operating system—held the potential to be a cornerstone of the entire computer industry. An operating system manages the flow of data within a computer, and gives programmers access to its hardwired information-processing capabilities. It is the crucial intermediary between the programmer who has a task he wants to accomplish and the semiconductor chips and circuitry that can make that happen. What Bill realized, and no one else saw, was that a standardized operating system could ultimately have enormous benefit for the industry, and therefore enormous strategic potential for its steward.
That was back in 1981. In the decade since, while Steve had been on a quest to make a series of breakthrough computers, Gates had been executing a far grander plan. IBM had given instant credibility to the concept of the personal computer, in a way that Apple had never managed to do, especially in the business world. Sales of its computers had quickly outpaced those of other manufacturers, including Apple. The proliferation of those IBM PCs had spread Microsoft’s MS-DOS widely, rivaled only by the proprietary operating system that Apple used on its machines. But Apple didn’t license its operating system to other computer makers. Gates, on the other hand, readily licensed his operating system to other manufacturers, who promptly started beating IBM at its own game. The new entrants, like Compaq and Dell and Gateway, were lean and aggressive companies that could take the two standard pieces of the IBM PC—Microsoft’s MS-DOS and Intel’s microprocessor chips—and produce clones that were faster, more innovative machines than those coming out of hidebound Big Blue. It was Compaq, for example, not IBM, that introduced the whole concept of a portable PC, opening up an important new slice of the market. Gates encouraged the clone manufacturers, licensing MS-DOS to them under the same terms he gave IBM. And his developers worked steadily to improve the operating system. MS-DOS eventually became the foundation of Windows, the operating system that supported the kind of graphical interface that Steve had pioneered with the Lisa and the Mac, and Windows became the standard of just about every personal computer other than those made by Apple. By 1991, Bill Gates’s operating systems were on 90 percent of all the PCs in the world. And the company that owned the other 10 percent? Well, that was Apple, which was becoming less relevant, less innovative, and less important year after year.