Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Microsoft.IT’S COMPLICATED

Friends (1981 to 1983)

During the development of the Macintosh in the

early 80s, Microsoft was an important ally.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were so close at the

time that according to a

Guardian article, they even double-dated occasionally.

Rivals (1983 to 1996)

Steve Jobs had this dream vs Bill Gates vision.

For years, Microsoft had engineers secretly copying the Macintosh OS and working on its own version of a Graphical OS: Windows.

Truce (1997 to 2002) Things changed when Steve Jobs came back

at Apple in 1997.

Jobs turned to Bill Gates for help.

Things were weird for a few years – 5 years to

be exact. Which corresponds to the 5 years of

the ‘Microsoft Deal’.

Frenemies (2003 to 2011)

At 2003 iPods were selling like hotcakes.

Apple understood it could not compete with

Microsoft on the desktop so it brought the

battle to another field: mobile.

The Get a Mac campaign hits the airwaves

and pokes fun of the PC industry and

Microsoft

Was Steve Jobs still bitter at Bill Gates and Microsoft after all these years?

Steve’s sudden change of attitude towards Microsoft

in the mid-00s seems to indicate that.

What both men really thought of each

others or what really happened

behind the curtain will probably never

be known