Bill Gates and Steve Jobs: D5 Conference, Part 1

In May 2007, the traditional D5 conference in the California town of Carlsbad, 30 miles from San Diego, gathered leaders from leading high-tech companies. On May 30, conference organizers Cara Swisher and Walt Mossberg conducted a historic interview in which top executives from Microsoft and Apple - Bill Gates and Steve Jobs - participated.
This text is the translation of the first part of the interview, the second part in the translation of Unno read here , the final part in the translation of Karlsson here .

The interview opened with the following video (YouTube, 7 minutes, 15 megabytes): Kara ¹ : Thank you.
Walt ² : Before we begin, there are several founders of the business in the hall - of course, two discoveries on this scene, but also several founders who did a lot for the industry, we saw them in the video just shown, some today among the public in the hall. Mitch Kapor ³ , could you climb wherever you are? Yeah, there he is.
[Applause]
Walt: And Fred Gibbons ⁴ , who did not come to D before, but came today. Fred. Here is Fred in the hall.
[Applause]
Walt: And I don’t know if this person is here, but I would like to recall our colleague, Brent Schlender ⁵ of Fortune, who, as far as I know, did the last joint interview with these guys. It was not on the scene, but it was in Fortune magazine. Brent, I don't know if you are in the room. If you are in the hall, can you get up? Maybe he is on his way here.
[Applause]
Video of the first part of the interview (YouTube, 10 minutes, 22 megabytes): Kara: So let's begin. First I would like to ask this question: in the press and blogs there were a lot of contrived debates about whose contribution to the computer technology industry is greater. Answer you first, Steve, with an opinion about Bill’s contribution, and then vice versa.

Steve: Well, as you know, Bill built the first company in his industry. And I think he built the first software company, before anyone in our industry understood what a software company was. And it was a huge contribution. Really huge. And the business model they finally implemented was one of those that work really well for the industry. I think the most important thing was that Bill was completely focused on software development before anyone realized what software really was.
Kara: What is the important direction?
Steve: Yes, exactly. You can still say a lot, but I think this is the most important. I also think that building a company is actually a difficult task, it requires the highest motivation to hire the best people, detain them to your company and make them work and do the best work in their lives. And Bill was able to combine these qualities all these years.
Walt: Bill, what do you think about the contribution of Steve and Apple?
Bill: The first thing I want to clarify is that I do not pretend to be Steve Jobs ⁶ . What Steve did was absolutely phenomenal, and if you go back to 1977, look at the Apple II computer, the idea of ​​making the computer a subject of the consumer market - this step made Apple a unique company. Yes, there were other personalities with their products, but the idea that the computer industry could be an incredibly powerful phenomenon - Apple realized this and started working in this direction first.
Then one of the most interesting things we did was Macintosh ⁷ and it was very risky. People may not remember that Apple really put everything on the company. Lisa ^{8 was} not able to satisfy the consumer and some people said that the overall approach was not so good, but the team built by Steve inside the company continued to achieve their goals, even demonstrating that they were ahead of their era for a while - I don’t know Do you remember the Twiggy ⁹ hard drive and ...
Steve: 128 kilobytes
Kara: O, Twiggy hard drive, yes.
Bill: Steve made a speech once, one of my favorites, where he literally said: "We created products that we ourselves want to use." So he really achieved this with his incredible taste and elegance, which made a huge impact on the industry. And his ability to stay close and feel where the next wave of progress should be has always been phenomenal. The industry has benefited greatly from its work. We are both happy to be a part of it, but I would say that I appreciate his contribution more than anyone else.
Steve: We are also incredibly happy to have such partners with whom we built our companies and then attracted great people. I mean, everything that was done by Microsoft and Apple was done by outstanding people, none of whom are sitting here today.
Kara: Not by us.
Walt: Not by us. That is, in a sense, in your face you represent all these people.
Steve: In a sense, yes. With an extremely significant contribution.
Walt: Bill mentioned Apple II in 1977, it was 30 years ago. Then there were a couple of other computers pursuing the idea of ​​accessibility for the average user. Looking back, indeed, the average user himself might not have been able to use those computers by modern standards, but the appearance of the Apple II definitely increased the number of those who could work with computers.
I will now turn to 1978 Apple advertising. A page in a magazine shows you how ancient the technology was. It said: Thousands of people discovered the Apple computer. And it was also said: you do not want to buy one of those computers into which you need to insert a cartridge. I think it was about Atari or something like that.
Steve: Oh, no.
Walt: You want a computer with which you can write your own programs. And, obviously, people still think so.
Steve: Yes, at that time we had some strange advertising campaigns. There was one where the action took place in the kitchen with the participation of a woman, apparently married. She typed recipes on the computer, and her husband looked approvingly from behind. Such nonsense was filmed, yes.
Walt: How did this work for you?
Steve: I don't think it worked well.
Walt: I know that the year Microsoft was created is 1977. As far as I know, Apple was created a year earlier, in 1976.
Steve: 1976.
Walt: Microsoft in ...
Bill: 1974, when we started writing BASIC. We started to supply BASIC in 1975.
Walt: Some people are here, but I don't think that most people know that there was some kind of Microsoft-made software on that Apple II computer. Want to talk about what happened then how it happened?
Bill: Yes. Then there were Altair ¹⁰ and several other companies - about 24 making different machines, but in 1977 the group was engaged in PET ¹¹ , TRS-80 ¹² ...
Walt: Commodore?
Bill: Yes. Commodore PET, TRS-80 and Apple II. The original Apple II BASIC, Integer BASIC - we had nothing to do with it. But then floating point operations appeared - I mainly worked with Stephen Wozniak on this.
Steve: Let me tell you. My partner, with whom we started working, was named Steve Wozniak. Outstanding, great guy. He wrote BASIC, which was BASIC’s best computer language on the planet. This language allowed to do things that no language allowed to do. You did not need to run it to find all the error messages. He found errors himself while you were typing and so on. He was perfect from any point of view, except for one thing - he only worked with fixed-point operations. Did not work with floating point. So we received a lot of feedback from people wanting that BASIC to work with a floating point. And, therefore, we begged Woz, please, please, solve this question.
Walt: Who are we? How many people then worked at Apple?
Steve: Actually, I am. We begged Woz to solve the floating-point problem, and he never solved it. He then wrote by hand on paper. He did not have an assembler or something with which he could write and check the code. It was all written on paper and he wanted to make it all work in the car. But he never implemented floating point operations.
Kara: Why?
Steve: It remains for me one of the secrets in life. I don't know, but he never did. Well, and then, as you know, Microsoft made a very popular, really good BASIC with support for floating-point operations, so we eventually turned to them and said, "Help."
Walt: And how much help was worth, I think you mentioned it earlier ...
Bill: Oh, it cost $ 31,000.
Walt: The amount Apple paid you for ...
Bill: For BASIC with floating point support. And I flew to Apple, spent two days there, getting a tape. Cassette films were then the main way to store information, remember? And you know, we had fun then. I think most of all we had fun afterwards when we worked together.
Walt: How were you having fun? Tell a story about this fun that came next.
Kara: Or, maybe, about what happened next, but it was not the greatest fun.
Walt: Let them tell.
Kara: Just teasing.
Bill: Steve might be able to start this story better. The team assembled to create the Macintosh was extremely committed. And there was a similar team on our side, which was completely focused on its activities. Jeff Harbers ¹³ , a lot of incredible people. And we really bet on our future, hoping that the Macintosh will be successful and then, with hope, the graphical interface as a whole will be successful, but first of all the thing that will spread widely will be Macintosh.
So we worked together. Plans were blurred. The quality was dubious. Price. When Steve first appeared, the cost of a computer was expected to be significantly less than that at the end, but it was still excellent.
Kara: So you worked in two places?
Bill: Well, yes, they worked in Seattle ¹⁴ and flew here and there.
Walt: But Microsoft, as I recall, was not Microsoft one of those companies that were allowed to have a Mac prototype then?
Steve: Yes. What is most interesting, it is difficult today to remember that Microsoft was not yet engaged in the software business. They put a lot on the Mac because it was this way that allowed them to get into the software business. On the PC platform then Lotus dominated the software industry.
Bill: So it is. We then had Multiplan ¹⁵ , which became a hit on the Apple II, then Mitch Kapor did an incredible job, counting on the future popularity of the IBM PC and the Lotus 1-2-3 appeared and, as you know, began to run in this business. So the question was posed as follows: what will be the next turn of the paradigm, when will it be possible to enter the business? We had Word, but WordPerfect was generally recognized as the strongest text editing software with dBase ¹⁶ databases.
Walt: And Word was a product running in DOS.
Bill: All the products I listed then worked only in DOS.
Walt: Yes.
Bill: Because Windows was not even in the plans then.
Walt: Yes.
Bill: At the end of the 80s, we began to approach Windows. That is, in the end, we set the paradigm to change in the direction of using the graphical interface and, in particular, Macintosh makes it possible to use the GUI with 128 kilobytes of memory, 22 kilobytes of which were used for the display buffer, 14 kilobytes for the operating system. So it was ...
Walt: 14 kilobytes?
Bill: Yes.
Walt: The first Mac OC occupied 14 kilobytes?
Bill: 14 kilobytes - the amount of memory that we had to use for our software. When the shell came out, it used all 128K.
Steve: The OS used more than 14 kilobytes. About 20.
Walt: I see.
Steve: We now supply all these computers with gigabytes of RAM, and no one even remembers 128 kilobytes.
Walt: I remember those times. I remember, then I had to pay a lot of money for a computer with 128 kilobytes. So the two companies worked side by side on the Mac project, because you were not the only leading software makers for it, right?
Steve: Apple did the Mac by itself, but we had Bill and his team involved in writing these apps. We made several applications by ourselves. We did MacPaint, MacDraw, and some other software, but Bill and his team did some really important work.
Kara: Today, talking about moving forward after the moment you went different ways and your company became more and more powerful, what do you think would happen to Apple after the kind of misfortune that happened when Steve left the company?
Bill: Well, as for Apple, they were hanging by a thread. We continued to make software for Macintosh. Excel, which Steve and I presented together in New York, was a kind of fun event that went well. But then, as you know, Apple simply didn’t adapt the results of its activities well enough to the needs of users, unlike a higher level platform.
Walt: So Windows?
Bill: DOS and Windows.
Walt: OK. This is especially highlighted by the rise of Windows in the early 90s.
Bill: By 1995, Windows became popular. The biggest debate was not around the confrontation of Mac and Windows. The biggest debate has been around using an alphanumeric or graphical interface. And when the 386 platform came out and we got more memory, speed began to respond to requests, and some development tools arrived, the changes made it obvious to everyone that the future is in the graphical interface.
Walt: But Apple could not improve their products?
Bill: After the release of the 512K Mac, the product line simply could not unwind quickly, there was no Steve there, as required. And we negotiated and were going to invest, having received in return some obligations from Gil Amilio ¹⁷ . No seriously.
Kara: Don't mention with him.
Bill: I do not understand?
Kara: By just saying Gil Amilio, you can piss Steve off.
Bill: I called Steve at the weekend and we talked about all this. Soon Steve called me and said: “Don't worry about all these talks with Gil Amilio. Now you can talk to me right now. ” ¹⁸ And I said, "Wow."
Steve: Gil was a good guy, he said, “Apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom into which water flows and my job is to keep this ship moving in the right direction”.
Video of the second part of the interview (YouTube, 10 minutes, 15 megabytes): Walt: In the meantime, I would like to go back to what we learned in 1997 at Macworld ¹⁹ — while Windows was rolling out its main weapon. I mean - no earlier versions of Windows had all the features of Windows 95 and the graphical user interface that Mac and Windows 95 had was really a giant, huge leap.
Bill: Yes. Since the days of Windows 95, the graphical interface has become the standard and the industry has understood: wow, that's what applications should be like. And it was surprising that the software released in 1993, 1994 was not accepted as a standard, and the 1995 came and the debate ended. It was a manifestation of common sense. And it was a combination of hardware and software, mature enough that people could feel the benefits and use them effectively.
Walt: I would not like to go into the details of the story of how you returned, but ...
Steve: Thank you.
Walt: But you in this video, which we all saw, said that you decided that this competition with Microsoft would be destructive. But, obviously, Apple was not in big trouble and I admit that you have taken some tactical or strategic reason to do this, moreover, you still wanted to seem just a cool guy, right?
Steve: You know, Apple had very big problems. And it was absolutely clear that if it was a game “not ours, not yours”, where if Apple won, Microsoft would have to lose, only then would Apple lose. But many still continue to think about it.
Kara: From your point of view, why is that?
Steve: The fact is that many people think that Apple attracts people because we have invented a lot, while Microsoft was successful, and Apple was not. On this basis envy arose and stuff like that. There were just many reasons for this, but in general, this is nonsense.
But ultimately it turned out that there were too many people in the Apple system who imagined that if Apple won, Microsoft would lose. And it was clear that these games should stop playing, because Apple was not going to win at all from Microsoft. Apple had to remember what Apple was, because people preferred to forget what Apple was.
So for me it was important enough to destroy this prevailing opinion. And that was also important because Microsoft was the largest Mac software developer, not counting Apple. So it was just insane - what happened then. Apple was extremely weak, so I called Bill and we tried to correct the situation.
Bill: And since then, Microsoft has a team whose work is aimed at creating applications for the Mac. Attitude to this unit has always been like something unique, created specifically for the relationship with Apple. And this scheme works fine. In fact, every couple of years something new happens that we can do on a Mac and this is a huge business for us.
Steve: And this relationship between the Mac development team and Microsoft is a really great relationship. One of our best relations between developers.
Kara: Do you treat each other like competitors today? Today, when the industry has evolved so much and we are talking about the Internet industry and other things, when other companies go so fast, how do you see yourself in this picture?
Walt: Because, as I understand it, you are still competitors in some sense, right?
Kara: We're all watching ads, right?
Walt: And from time to time you are just annoyed with each other, right?
Kara: Although you know what? I have to admit, I like the PC ad guy.
Walt: Yes, he is great.
Kara: Yes, I love him. I want a young one.
Steve: The purpose of this advertisement is not what it seems to be an advertisement in order to maintain a good relationship between the guys. Thank. The PC guy is really great. He has a huge heart.
Bill: His mother adores her son.
Steve: His mom loves her son.
Kara: I seriously declare to you, I love the guy depicting a PC much more.
Steve: Wow.
Kara: So it is. I do not know why. He inspires his love. The second guy is just an ass.
Steve: Actually, all the work in that ad is done by the PC guy.
Walt: Yes.
Steve: There is something to think about ...
Kara: So how do you see yourself today?
Walt: Let me just ask you a question, Bill. Obviously, Microsoft is larger than Apple, you have more markets, more products than Apple. When you, Bill, led the company or when Steve Ballmer runs the company, do you think the obvious things about Google? You think, well, for example, about Linux at the enterprise level, you think about Sony in the game industry. How often is Apple on the Microsoft business sensitivity radar screen?
Bill: They are on the screen of this radar as an opportunity. In some cases, like Zune, for example, people think that Apple is a competitor. People like the fact that Apple has created a huge market that they want to try and offer something on it as well and they will try to make a contribution.
Steve: And we love them, because they are all buyers.
Walt: I’ll have to tell you that J. Allard gave me ²⁰ , seriously, because of the processor design, the platform they used to develop most of the software for the Xbox 360 was Macs. And he argued that at some point they placed the maximum order for Macs, more than anyone else before them, that is, Macs' most valuable customers were Microsoft.
Bill:I don't know if this was the biggest order, but yes, we had the same processors that we had in Macs. The irony is that Apple stopped using those processors, and the Xbox 360 took over them. But for the better, in both cases. Because we did not deal with portable applications and this was one of the cases when you do not have clear plans for using processors. But yes, it expresses our pragmatism, we try and do things in this way. So it was a development system so that the first customers get the software ready for the release of the Xbox 360.
Steve: And we never ran an ad about it.
Walt: I see. Restraint of the strongest. This is a wonderful reason for restraint.
Steve: There were hundreds of such cases.
Bill:Steve is well known for his restraint.
Kara: How do you view Microsoft from an Apple perspective? I mean, you are competitors in the computer industry and ...
Walt: We mean, even though you say that you are not competitors, as you said, “the era of destructive something ended there in 1997,” but you plan, you consciously for what they do with Windows, you're learning Vista, I think, and close enough ...
Steve:You know what is really interesting - and we talked about it earlier today - if you look at the reasons for the iPod and Apple’s place in this market, everything happened because there are really big Japanese consumer electronics companies that have their own market portable music devices invented and produced by them. But they do not know how to produce suitable software, they cannot invent and make convenient software. Because the iPod is really software only. Software in iPod, software on PC or Mac, software in the Internet cloud, for the iTunes store. And this is not a great box, it is primarily software. If you look at what Mac is, this is OS X, right? It's not a great box, but it's OS X. And if you look at what it is, I hopeThe iPhone is also software first.
So Apple's biggest secret, of course - is not as big a secret as it seems - is that Apple sees itself primarily as a software company, among the few remaining. Microsoft is also a software company. And, as you know, we look at what they are doing and we think of it as something really big, and we think that this is a bit of competition, but by and large it does not. We have no conviction that the Mac is going to take away more than 80% of the PC market. You know, we are really happy, when the share of our market increases even by a little, we like it, we really work hard on it, but Apple’s fundamental basis is that it’s primarily a software company, which is not much, Microsoft is one of of them.
Walt:You may be a software company, but as you know, at least for your clients and most journalists, a company that pays a lot of attention to the integration of software and hardware. Microsoft recently took a few steps toward this, obviously, not in key areas, but with the Xbox and Zune, and, as you know, with Surface devices, we met another example today. These are not markets where Microsoft’s presence is limited to Windows or Office, but they are reminiscent of your recent initiatives. The companies approach to such a merger a bit or ...
Steve: Alan Kay perfectly said in the late 70s. He said, “People who love software want to build their own hardware.”
Walt:Bill loves software.
Steve: Oh, I just can't resist him.
Bill: The question is, do we get a positive result by entering the markets with innovation and diversity at the same time? The bad thing is that in the early stages you really want to get both together, so you do prototyping and stuff, all together.
Take for example the phone market. Windows is in some way present on about 140 different hardware modifications. We think it is beneficial to us, so even if we did some of the models ourselves, it would give us the result that we already get in the course of this partnership.
Also take the market of robots, which is in its infancy today. We have over 140 robots running on Microsoft software. Creativity, the creation of toys, safety devices, medical devices - we love innovation and the ecosystem that is created around - who knows when it will be created - but we are patient and confident that we will get huge profits from the software platform for robotics applications.
So there are several things, such as PCs, phones, and robots, where Microsoft chooses diversity.
As for Apple, everything is great. For them, what they do works just fine. There are several markets like the Xbox 360, Zune, and this year we have two new ones, Surface and RoundTable, which is essentially a subject for the conference room. In these markets we market through subcontractors, profit and loss is still in question, it all applies to hardware, design, as completely Microsoft products.
Walt: RoundTable - is that what you announced here?
Bill: We show prototypes of this. It's such a thing when you have 360 ​​degrees ...
Walt: Yes. Cisco has developments in this market and HP too, right?
Bill: HP has a very high-tech device, a bit like that, but be that as it may.
(YouTube, 10 , 22 ): Walt: Well, yes. (Turning to Jobs) Have you ever regretted - was there anything you wanted to do differently? Or maybe you felt so after you left Apple? There was something that you thought you needed to do differently, and then you could get a much larger market share for Macs?
Steve: Before I answer, let me comment on Bill’s response to the consumer and industry markets as completely different sites. In the consumer market, I believe, someone else can create a fairly strong game, of course, not as it was with Windows on the PC. It is difficult to see other examples of how software and hardware work separately and very well at the same time. This can happen on the phone market over time. May be.But it is not clear. It is not clear. You can find many examples of successful hardware and software collaboration.
So I think one of the reasons that we come to work every day is that no one still knows the answers to some of these questions here. And we will look for these answers in the coming years and maybe both approaches will work well, or maybe not.
Walt: Yes.
Bill: Yes. This is a great time to try both approaches. In some categories of products - take the music players - offering the same design works better. In the personal computer market, a variety of designs and forms at this stage of development plays a big role.
Walt: Plays a big role? Plays a huge role.
Bill: Not with such strong differences as in the case of music players.
Walt: Were there times when you felt - I had to do it or Apple had to do it and then we could ...
Kara: You stopped at this idea of ​​integrating hardware and software, that now it works fine.
Steve: A lot of things happened, what I thought I could do better when I was running Apple for the first time. A lot of things happened after I left Apple, which I thought was wrong, but now it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter and you have to go through such things and we are what we are. Based on this, we tend to look forward.
You know, one thing I did when I returned to Apple 10 years ago was shipping all the papers, all the old cars to the Stanford Museum, a kind of web cleaning. I said: stop looking back. We are committed to what will happen tomorrow. Because you can’t look back and say yes, but if I hadn’t been fired, if I had been there, if I had been this one. Irrelevant. So let's invent it tomorrow, rather than regret what happened yesterday.
Kara:We will talk more about tomorrow, let's talk a little about today, how you evaluate various players in the market and how you look at the development of the industry now. What is especially unexpected for both of you today, because you are old-timers of the IT industry, you are very active and your companies are still key companies? There are a large, very large number of companies that have become very strong. What do you feel in your industry today, what is happening, especially in the field of the Internet?
Steve:I think today the IT industry is flourishing more than ever. I think there are a lot of young people who create great companies, who want to create companies that do not just want to start something and quickly sell it to the big guys, but those who really want to create companies. And I think there are already some really amazing companies built this way. In a way, the business of the next generation, which some of us already pick up and find in the person of these young guys partners, but besides this today there are still many unoccupied niches ...
(Continuing the interview, read the Unno translation here , the final part is translated Karlsson here )

¹ Kara Swisher — , Wall Street Journal, ( Wikipedia ); ² Walter S. Mossberg — ( 1947) Wall Street Journal ( Wikipedia ); ³ Mitchell David Kapor — ( 1950) Lotus Development Corporation Lotus 1-2-3, , - 80- ( Wikipedia ); ⁴ Fred M. Gibbons — ( 1949) 1975-1981 HP, ( ); ⁵ Brent Schlender — Fortune ( ); ⁶ , «The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs». , : «, iPod. - ?» ( Jial , fakesteve.blogspot.com ); ⁷ Mac ( Macintosh) — , , Apple Inc. ( Wikipedia ); ⁸ Apple Lisa — , Apple Computer 1980- ( Wikipedia ); ⁹ The Twiggy disk — Apple Lisa, Apple Twiggy, FileWare ( Wikipedia ); ¹⁰ Altair 8800 — , 1975 , Intel 8080 ( Wikipedia );
¹¹ Commodore PET — (PET — Personal Electronic Transactor, ) / , Commodore 70- ( Wikipedia );
¹² TRS-80 — , Tandy, Tandy, 1970- 1980- ( Wikipedia ); ¹³ Jeffrey M. Harbers — Microsoft 1981-1990, Microsoft Office. 24 2006 ( ); ¹⁴ , Seattle Computer Products. Seattle Computer Products (SCP) — Intel 8086 ( wikipedia ); ¹⁵ Multiplan — , VisiCalc, Microsoft ( Wikipedia ); ¹⁶ Base , Ashton-Tate CP/M Apple II, Apple Macintosh, UNIX, VMS, IBM PC DOS, . ( Wikipedia ); ¹⁷ Gilbert F. Amelio — ( 1943 ) 1994-1997 Apple Computer ( Wikipedia ;) ¹⁸ Apple 1997 ( ); ¹⁹ Macworld 1997 Microsoft ( Wikipedia , YouTube ); ²⁰J. Allard (born 1969) Vice President of Corporation, Chief XNA Architect at Microsoft ( Wikipedia ).
This text is a translation of the interview given by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at D5 during the D5 conference on May 31, 2007. Published May 31, 2007 Amber Israelson, Ubiqus Reporting Inc.
Separate illustrations and videos are taken from the following sources:
d5.allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript
When reprinting a translation, please refer to the original and the present text, www.habrahabr.ru/blog/translations/16955.html .
The author of the translation will be grateful for comments, comments, corrections of possible inaccuracies and participation in the adjustment of the translation of the interview.