Quote of the Day
Steve Jobs on Bill Gates: He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
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October 26th, 2011 at 8:58 am
Dear Steve,
Xerox PARC is on line one for you.
October 26th, 2011 at 9:05 am
Pot, meet kettle.
October 26th, 2011 at 10:36 am
I saw it alleged somewhere that Apple actually licensed the Xerox stuff.
October 26th, 2011 at 11:11 am
Well thank god jobs never did that for macOS or the iPhone …. Hey what’s this BSD thing
Opps
October 26th, 2011 at 12:42 pm
At least Gates showered more than once a week, Stinky.
October 26th, 2011 at 1:08 pm
And I made BILLIONS! BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! God bless America! (walking to the bank…..)
October 26th, 2011 at 3:16 pm
Steve’s a bitch. then ya die.
October 26th, 2011 at 3:30 pm
The Woz is still alive, and is a genuinely nice guy. Yeah, Steve cheated him, too.
October 26th, 2011 at 3:51 pm
If Bill Gates contracts pancreatic cancer, delays surgical intervention to allow a macrobiotic diet to take effect, and then dies from the complications of the disease, THEN I’ll say he’s been slavishly imitating Steve Jobs’ work.
October 26th, 2011 at 4:10 pm
RC: I don’t know about licensing, but they visited PARC for demos and hired Xerox engineers. If the claim was just that they “stole” the idea of windowing, it’d be both unimpressive and unobjectionable, though still inaccurate in implication.
(See here for more details.
What Apple shipped bore only a vague resemblance to the XEROX Alto/Star systems. It’s almost like their “ripping off” was more “inspiration” than just copying.
And if we’re going to claim “windowing” and “GUI” and “mouse” are what was being ripped off (which is the standard line of argument), well… Xerox stole liberally from the Stanford NLS.
Odd that nobody points that out when trying to screw Apple for making the GUI more than a curiosity.
Almost every idea in computing is evolutionary – but somehow we get the repeated proposition [not just in these comments] that Xerox invented the GUI, and Apple just copied it from PARC[“, lulz”].
More accurately, Xerox refined ideas from the NLS into something that approached usability for a normal human being.
Then Apple refined them even further (and, like Xerox, added completely novel improvements and entire sets of ideas), making something that actually worked on hardware human beings could afford.
If that’s “ripping off ideas”, well, God bless ’em all. Otherwise we’d all be using MULTICS or something.)
(Also, we should remember that Jobs’ quote is about Bill Gates, not Microsoft.
Gates was never personally an inventor or innovator to any significant extent – and never claimed to be, did he?
Certainly not since maybe 1980, though he was a programmer at least at some level through the 80s, and quite competent – but as one myself, I can assure you that programing is not inherently inventive to a meaningful extent.
He was typically a brilliant entrepreneur, which is a different thing – remember that MS’s original success was secured by licensing 86-DOS/QDOS and getting a cozy deal with IBM.)
October 26th, 2011 at 6:00 pm
Sigi: I love reading business history books. I’d recommend Fumbling the Future: how Xerox invented, then ignored the personal computer.
I don’t remember the title, but around the same time I read a pretty good account of Microsoft from inception to right around the mid 1990s.
Gates and his initial batch of coders spent endless hours sleeping under desks and living on nothing but pizza and soda.
Whatever success they’ve achieved, I’d say they worked damned hard and really deserved it.
October 26th, 2011 at 9:03 pm
Oddly, it was recently revealed that Apple was granted a patent on the “swipe to unlock” gesture used in iphoneys, even though it was available on smart phones running WindowsCE years before.