AWESOME Dude!

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have been at loggerheads over technology since the early to mid eighties. Their very different approaches to technical solutions have made them both very wealthy, with legions of fans of both sides arguing over whose ideas are better.

Bill Gates took the open hardware approach, with various versions of Windows being able to work with just about anything from multiple processor monster set-ups to tree stumps. Sometimes multiple solutions work very well together, as seen by the huge number of computer companies making WinPCs and software titles for Windows, and sometimes they don’t as witnessed by the numerous viruses, adware, spyware, keystroke loggers, and the like. Some of which require nothing more to install and have control of your machine than the user to have access to the Internet on an unprotected computer.

Steve Jobs took a different approach. From the day the Macintosh was born until he was encouraged to leave Apple, the Mac was a closed platform. No hardware could be added without the express written permission of Apple. NeXT computers was much the same until he realized too late that NeXT hardware wasn’t what most wanted, just the software.

Upon his return to Apple, he found the company in bad shape. Money was exiting much faster than anything coming in with pie in the sky projects that seemed to generate nothing but development costs. First to go was the Mac clones. Seemed like a good idea when it first started, but Apple’s hefty mark-ups were too high to really compete with companies making essentially the same computers. The little PDA that could (but didn’t sell in numbers high enough to justify its existence), the Newton was also on the chopping block.

Flash forward to 2007. Microsoft finally gets Vista out the door missing many of the features that were promised to be included. Meanwhile, Apple not wanting to miss out on the “Our OS is late too” bus, delays Leopard until October, with no iLife or iWork upgrades even mentioned.

These two guys are more alike than they are different. Both lead (or have led) multi-million dollar corporations with tech geeks who either love them or hate them hanging on their every word. So it’s probably a near belly-button exploring nirvana trip for most of them that they will meet, in public, and speak together at the “All things Digital” conference sponsored by the Wall Street Journal in Carlsbad, California on Wednesday May 29th for a 75 minute sit down.

I would love to be there myself, but can’t afford the scratch.