Mossberg on Steve Jobs

Walter Mossberg has a nice remembrance of Steve Jobs in the WSJ. An excerpt:

For our fifth All Things Digital Conference, both Steve and his longtime rival, the brilliant Bill Gates, surprisingly agreed to a joint appearance, their first extended onstage joint interview ever. But it almost got derailed.

Earlier in the day, before Gates arrived, I did a solo onstage interview with Jobs, and asked him what it was like to be a major Windows developer, since Apple's iTunes program was by then installed on hundreds of millions of Windows PCs.

He quipped: "It's like giving a glass of ice water to someone in Hell."

When Gates later arrived and heard about the comment, he was, naturally, enraged. In a pre-interview meeting, Gates said to Jobs "so I guess I'm the representative from hell."

Jobs merely handed Gates a cold bottle of water. The tension was broken, and the interview was a triumph, with both men acting like statesmen. When it was over, the audience rose in a standing ovation, some of them in tears.



Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203476804576613732041665792.html#ixzz1aIBOSDJ9

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