Bill Gates Vs Steven Jobs

An interesting comparison of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs

But they did represent opposite approaches to business and technology. Bill was the ultimate pragmatist. He put out bad software, buggy and flawed, but he got it out to the market, and then he fixed some of the problems in the next version and then the next and then the next. He persisted and he struggled and eventually he wound up with a good piece of software. He was poor Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill, but he kept pushing. It was a messy process, it was excruciatingly incremental, it was full of angst, but it worked. He had a bias for action. He took pride in the fact that his company shipped products.

Steve, in contrast was the ultimate perfectionist. When he came out with a new computer, it had to be revolutionary, astonishing. In his own words, it had to be “insanely great”. He wanted a great leap forward not an incremental push. He wanted something that people would love not tolerate grudgingly because they had no other viable alternatives. He conceived of his engineers as artists and even had them sign their names on the inside of the Macintosh. He had exhorted them with the mantra “Great artist’s ship”. Picasso and Matisse didn’t hold on to their canvasses for years; they finished them and sold them off.

From THE SECOND COMING OF STEVE JOBS (page 54)