Chapter 6

Bill Gates Pays a Visit

In the early afternoon of July 21, 1991, five people converged on Steve Jobs’s house in Palo Alto. It was an unusually warm summer Sunday; the temperature had soared well into the nineties, and judging from the stuffy atmosphere inside, it didn’t seem that Steve had gotten around to turning on the air-conditioning. He had dashed back from a weekend Yosemite getaway with Laurene at the Ahwahnee lodge, the same rustic inn where the two had been married a few months prior.

Steve had only recently purchased the house. Neither he nor Laurene was interested in raising a family in a rambling, crumbling mansion isolated in the hills of Woodside. They wanted their children to grow up in a more central location, and Old Palo Alto, as the neighborhood was known, was quiet, shady, and within walking distance of schools and downtown. Also, Steve’s first child, Lisa—now a teenager—lived nearby with her mother. The house featured enormous wooden beams that had been used as forms for concrete work on the Golden Gate Bridge, yet it was anything but ostentatious, at least by Bay Area standards. (John Lasseter puckishly calls it the “Hansel and Gretel” house.) Steve would call this home for the rest of his life.

Steve and Laurene made a few additions and modifications over the years but nothing really radical, and eventually they acquired an adjoining lot in order to expand the vegetable and flower garden that they both tended. The garden was just getting started that July, but already it was teeming with tomatoes, sunflowers, string beans, cauliflower, basil, and an assortment of lettuces. They had planted wild grasses native to Northern California around the perimeter of the property, which faced intersecting streets on two sides. Some neighbors grumbled at first, but most came to appreciate the way the color and character of the vegetation would change with the seasons. In spring the plantings would explode with wildflowers, and in summer the untrimmed clumps of grass would shimmer in the wind. There was no security wall, just a short split-rail fence bordering the sidewalk. There wasn’t even a garage. Steve and Laurene rarely used the big wooden front door of the house. Most visitors would park on the street behind Steve’s Porsche or Mercedes, enter the gate by the garden, and knock on the kitchen door, if it wasn’t already standing wide open to catch the breeze.

This was the first of many visits I would make over the next ten years, and Steve made a point of having me, the photographer George Lange, and his assistant come to this kitchen door, which was indeed standing wide open on this warm day. The guest of honor apparently didn’t get the word to use this entrance, or else he simply forgot. He arrived about fifteen minutes after the appointed time, and used the big knocker on the front door to let us know he had arrived. Steve and I went to greet him, and Bill Gates waved to the driver of his black limo to leave. We all shook hands and went inside.

The house was a fraction of the size of the Jackling Mansion in Woodside, and just as sparsely furnished, at least at that point. The living room had a half dozen or so framed prints by Ansel Adams leaning against the walls, yet to be hung. An audiophile-quality stereo system in a vertical rack had been set up with a couple of speaker towers carefully placed along one wall, and about a hundred LPs sat on the floor, some in a box and others loosely propped near the stereo.

The only seats were two classic Eames lounge chairs with footstools. Bill and Steve sat in the chairs, and I sat on an ottoman. Bill occasionally would move to the other ottoman or get up and pace a little, while Steve, who was barefoot, remained seated with his legs curled up underneath him for most of the session. George roamed the room freely, snapping pictures as the two men talked.

The occasion: the first of only two formal joint interviews that the pair would ever grant. (The latter would take place sixteen years later, onstage at a high-tech business conference.) I had arranged the meeting as the key element of a package of cover stories in Fortune to commemorate the tenth anniversary of IBM’s shipment of its first PC, and to contemplate the future of the young industry. It had been relatively easy to get Bill to buy in to the idea of the interview. Indeed, he was willing to interrupt a beach vacation with his friend Ann Winblad, a fellow coder from Minnesota, who was now a venture capitalist. Like Bill, she too enjoyed taking a stack of thick books along so they could read and discuss them. Bill had begun dating Melinda French, his future wife, several years before, but even after their romance blossomed, he let her know that he planned to continue to take his “think week” vacations with Winblad.

Steve, on the other hand, had played hard to get. Unlike Gates, he insisted on setting certain parameters for the get-together, primarily that it occur on his turf. Bill would have to come to his house in Palo Alto, and only on this particular Sunday. The interview violated what had become Steve’s basic criteria for publicity—he would only put himself out for stories that promoted his company’s products. If I was going to get this kind of exclusive, unfettered access on an occasion where he had nothing to sell, it was damn well going to be on his terms.

THE CAREERS OF Bill Gates and Steve Jobs intertwine in ways that illuminate the entire history of the personal computer industry—and that help explain why Steve was so unsuccessful at NeXT, and, more important, why he was able to succeed so brilliantly upon his return to Apple. While Fortune would cast the interview as a retrospective, it turned mostly into a discussion that forecast the directions in which the two men would eventually take the world of computing. Bill and Steve were two very different people with two very different approaches to computing, approaches that perfectly suited and reflected their personalities. Fortune was right to recognize them as cofounders of the PC revolution, but in 1991 it would have been a stretch to predict that these same two men would shape the industry for yet another two decades. But that’s how it turned out: for thirty-five years, from the creation of the Apple II until Steve’s death in 2011, their differing philosophies helped determine the design and purpose and marketing of everything from smartphones and iPods, to the cheapest laptops and desktop machines, to the massive mainframe computers that drove the productivity of Fortune 500 companies.

By 1991, their differences had placed the two thirty-somethings (Steve, then thirty-six, was eight months older than Bill) on opposite trajectories. Quite simply, Steve’s career had been spiraling downward, while Bill’s was soaring to unseen levels. One simple proof of Bill’s rising power: For this interview reviewing the decade since the shipment of the first IBM PC, Fortune hadn’t even considered inviting someone from IBM. That’s because Gates had neutered Big Blue even before the company manufactured its first personal computer, when he convinced them to license his operating system, MS-DOS, without an exclusivity clause. That brilliant gambit meant that by 1991 it was Gates, not IBM, who held the keys to the industry’s future.

Bill’s end run around IBM hinged on the fact that he had understood something IBM had not: that the software IBM was looking for—that is, an operating system—held the potential to be a cornerstone of the entire computer industry. An operating system manages the flow of data within a computer, and gives programmers access to its hardwired information-processing capabilities. It is the crucial intermediary between the programmer who has a task he wants to accomplish and the semiconductor chips and circuitry that can make that happen. What Bill realized, and no one else saw, was that a standardized operating system could ultimately have enormous benefit for the industry, and therefore enormous strategic potential for its steward.

That was back in 1981. In the decade since, while Steve had been on a quest to make a series of breakthrough computers, Gates had been executing a far grander plan. IBM had given instant credibility to the concept of the personal computer, in a way that Apple had never managed to do, especially in the business world. Sales of its computers had quickly outpaced those of other manufacturers, including Apple. The proliferation of those IBM PCs had spread Microsoft’s MS-DOS widely, rivaled only by the proprietary operating system that Apple used on its machines. But Apple didn’t license its operating system to other computer makers. Gates, on the other hand, readily licensed his operating system to other manufacturers, who promptly started beating IBM at its own game. The new entrants, like Compaq and Dell and Gateway, were lean and aggressive companies that could take the two standard pieces of the IBM PC—Microsoft’s MS-DOS and Intel’s microprocessor chips—and produce clones that were faster, more innovative machines than those coming out of hidebound Big Blue. It was Compaq, for example, not IBM, that introduced the whole concept of a portable PC, opening up an important new slice of the market. Gates encouraged the clone manufacturers, licensing MS-DOS to them under the same terms he gave IBM. And his developers worked steadily to improve the operating system. MS-DOS eventually became the foundation of Windows, the operating system that supported the kind of graphical interface that Steve had pioneered with the Lisa and the Mac, and Windows became the standard of just about every personal computer other than those made by Apple. By 1991, Bill Gates’s operating systems were on 90 percent of all the PCs in the world. And the company that owned the other 10 percent? Well, that was Apple, which was becoming less relevant, less innovative, and less important year after year.

The hegemony of its operating systems paid off in multiple ways for Microsoft. Early incarnations of its applications, like Word and Excel, had been designed from the bottom up to work with MS-DOS and then Windows, giving Microsoft an edge over other software companies like WordPerfect and Lotus, which also made productivity-oriented applications. In 1990, Gates had bundled all his productivity applications into a package called Microsoft Office. Sales of Office were so robust that other software developers were pushed even further to the side. By 1991, Microsoft was far and away the world’s dominant software company. And Bill was nowhere near done. He was about to steer Microsoft into a position so powerful that only the government could restrain the company.

All the success had transformed the public’s perception of Gates himself, of course. He had started the 1980s as something of a supplicant to IBM and Apple. Back then, Jobs was the rich face of the computer industry, his stake in the company he founded worth $256 million immediately after its IPO. When Microsoft went public in March 1986, Gates’s 45 percent in equity was worth $350 million. By the time of our interview, he had become the world’s youngest billionaire. Steve’s bank account, meanwhile, had plummeted while he scoured around unsuccessfully for another great new product. Now Bill ruled the roost, while it was becoming increasingly difficult to forecast a future in which Steve Jobs would have any important role to play in the computer industry.

IN THEORY, the interview had the potential to be a fistfight. Both men had developed—and, in many ways, earned—serious reputations as prickly, cut-throat competitors.

Many people have forgotten what a difficult guy Bill Gates could be. In the years since his 2000 resignation as Microsoft’s CEO, as Gates has transformed himself into a global philanthropist, the public has seen a thoughtful, caring, and sharply focused elder statesman try to tackle enormously difficult public health and education problems. All those qualities (minus the “elder” part) were in place in 1991, but back then Bill was competing in the computer industry, not investing in a cure for malaria and prodding countries to attack AIDS, provide cleaner drinking water, and find ways to help farmers weather global warming. Gates was trying to execute a plan to make Windows ubiquitous, running on anything that could compute, and he lived in constant paranoia of leaving weak spots that would allow a competitor to pierce the shell he’d built around the industry. “That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he would snap at coworkers whose business analysis failed to live up to his standards, and then drive his point home by shaking his head in exasperation and muttering, “That is so totally random.” Bill, with some justification, always thought he was the smartest guy in the room. He was willing to explain his rationale for a decision once, but pity those who needed a second recitation; that too could provoke a sarcastic outburst or, worse yet, a simmering passive-aggressive anger that would later reveal itself unexpectedly, in withering fashion.

In public, the two men had attacked each other regularly, even gleefully, and they would continue to do so for years. Steve cast Bill as a philistine with zero aesthetic sense and little originality. It was a view he’d hold throughout his life. Bill, he told me repeatedly, knew no other solution than throwing money and people at a problem, which was why Microsoft’s software was so convoluted and mediocre. (Steve conveniently ignored his own spendthrift ways at NeXT.) Bill bluntly painted Steve as a loser who had fallen from importance because of his own stupid decisions. He was relentless about NeXT’s insignificance. Later in the 1990s, when Jobs supported the Department of Justice’s effort to rein in the Microsoft monopoly, Gates repeatedly threw Steve in with the vast set of “losers” who “whined” about what he saw as his company’s deserved success.

But that Sunday in July they behaved themselves, with little friction and no open acknowledgment of the obvious disparity in their wealth and power. Steve was too proud to concede Bill’s preeminence. Bill was too well-behaved to gloat over Steve’s current woes. They accorded one another a certain level of respect. They understood each other’s strengths. With nothing at stake and the country’s leading business magazine there to pat them on the back, none of the negative sentiments flared.

Face-to-face on this Sunday afternoon, the slights—and there were a few—were couched. After Bill attacked John Sculley for wanting to license Apple’s operating system so other manufacturers could create Apple clones, Steve got a shot in at both Sculley and Gates. “I’m not interested in building a PC,” Steve said, criticizing the standardization that Bill had promulgated. “Tens of millions of people needlessly use a computer that is far less good than it should be.” That eventually led to the only outright insult, which they both found funny. Making the case that Microsoft’s dominance hindered innovation in the industry, Steve said, “In the MS-DOS world, there are hundreds of people making PCs.”

“Right,” said Bill.

“And there are hundreds of people making applications for those PCs.”

“Right.”

“But they all have to pass through this very small orifice called Microsoft to get to one another.”

“It’s a very large orifice,” Bill replied, leaning way back in his chair as he laughed. “I keep telling you it’s being extended.… It’s not even an orifice. We shouldn’t have used that term.”

“It’s been used before,” said Steve, grinning like a little kid.

“Which orifice?” Bill asked, grinning right back at Steve, before catching himself and leaning forward again. “Anyway …”

Bill was the steadier and more consistent of the two. His vision of the history of the industry was as assured as his sense of where it would go. “I wrote down in 1975, when I started the company,” he explained, casting his extraordinary foresight as nothing more than a simple vocalization of what should have been obvious to everyone, “that there were two focuses of technology in terms of building computers. One was chips, the other was software.” He went on to add, “My approach to the PC market has been the same from the beginning. The goals of Microsoft to create the standards for that machine have been the same from day one.” He didn’t apologize for any aspect of Microsoft’s success. He wouldn’t outright acknowledge its near monopoly, but he argued forcefully that standardization around his operating system and Intel’s chips benefited everyone. “Now the latest chip technology passes through to the consumer so fast and so efficiently,” he said. “When Intel comes up with a new microprocessor chip, a few weeks later two hundred PC companies have come up with a machine, and you can drive out to the computer warehouse and buy a machine. It’s the same if you take software. Because the volumes are so immense, incredible software that’s ten times as good as anything that was out even five years ago is available for essentially the same price. Even in strange categories you can choose from so much software.”

Given his uncertain position at the time, it wasn’t surprising that Steve was the more volatile participant. He was willing to admit a few mistakes, even allowing that Bill was correct in saying that Apple should have taken the IBM PC more seriously. Then he took that thought further. “The singular event that defined Apple’s place in the industry in the 1980s was actually not the Macintosh,” he announced. “That was a positive event. The negative event that defined Apple’s place was the Apple III. It was the first example I’d seen in my career of a product taking on a life of its own and developing way beyond what was necessary to satisfy customer demand. The project took eighteen months more than we’d planned and was overdesigned and cost a little too much. It’s interesting to speculate what would’ve happened if the Apple III had come out right, as a lean, mean upgrade to the Apple II that offered incremental features that made it more suitable for business. [Instead,] Apple left a real hole.” Later, he made clear that much of the blame could be laid at his feet: “One of the reasons that the Apple III had problems was that I grabbed some of the best people from that project to do research on how to turn what I saw at Xerox [PARC] into reality.”

It was a fascinating admission. Steve was never much for looking back at his own mistakes, and yet during this very public conversation with a friend whom everyone but Jobs now acknowledged as the leader of the computer industry, he was downright contrite. Later in the conversation, he even pulled out a story he’d ripped from the pages of Newsweek to make sure that Bill wasn’t offended by the author’s claim that Steve was no longer his friend. “I tore this out and I was going to call you before I knew we were getting together,” he said, brandishing the page like a trial attorney. “This is not true at all, and I have no idea where they got that.”

Steve became most engaged when we started discussing whether the PC industry would ever again produce a breakthrough machine like the Mac. That was the kind of product that most interested Steve, of course. At every stage of his life, he always wanted to create devices that would completely reset the industry. “Fundamentally,” he explained, “the PC industry is taking the existing and repackaging it or making it run faster. I think that’s much more valuable than I used to. But I also think that what’s the real trick, and the real necessity to keep our industry healthy, is to balance that incremental improvement with some big steps. I worry about the big steps, and where they’re going to come from.” Later he added, “The standard bearer needs a kick in the ass every once in a while. [Besides,] it’s great for the creator of the deviant innovation. If they’re right, there’s a big pot of gold there, and the ability to make a contribution to the world.”

Bill wasn’t obsessed with the revolutionary. He knew that there was a place for breakthrough technologies, and that the nature of the tech business—indeed, human nature itself—guaranteed that such milestones would arise. But over the course of the interview he made clear that what was closer to his heart was the pain that such disruptions caused the corporate customers of his software. “All I want is a car that will run on the current streets,” he explained. “I’m on this evolutionary path.” The huge investments corporate America had started to make in personal computers and in the critical applications it used to run operations “make for some very unusual dynamics,” he said. “In an Egghead Software store five years from now you’re not going to find business software for six different types of desktop computers. Personally, I would be stunned if you would find software for more than one overwhelmingly successful type of computer, and maybe a couple of others. More than three would be shocking.”

When Steve had left Apple in 1985, the primary competition in the computer hardware business had been framed as a battle to design the best machine; whoever did that, it was assumed, would win the most customers. But six years later that wasn’t the game at all, a fact that Steve was only slowly coming to understand, in light of his difficulties with the NeXT computer. The game was now all about serving corporate customers with their millions of machines. Those companies were increasingly reliant on their PCs, which ran custom-built applications that helped them execute complicated, data-intensive operations. They needed these applications to work with every new unit. The cost of re-creating their data to fit, say, a NeXT computer that didn’t work with the Windows operating system would have been exorbitant, not just in the financial cost of reprogramming but in the opportunity cost lost to all the time required by a retrofit. It wasn’t the bells and whistles that excited these customers; in fact, they found bells and whistles kind of scary. Nope, what they needed was more power, more speed, and above all else, reliability.

Very few people writing about this new industry in the mainstream press truly understood how personal computers had already begun to revert to institutional machines. This was mainly because it was easier for most journalists of the early 1990s to envision and get personally excited about the potential of educational software, or of managing their personal finances, or organizing their recipes in the “digital” kitchen, or imagining how amateur architects could design funky homes right on their home computers. Who wouldn’t be excited about more power in the hands of people, the computer as an extension of the brain, a “bicycle for the mind,” as Steve put it? This was the story of computing that got all the ink, and it was a story no one unfurled as well as Steve.

Bill Gates wasn’t swayed by that romance. He saw it as a naïve fantasy that missed the point of the much more sophisticated things PCs could do for people in the enterprise. A consumer market can be an enormously profitable one—put simply, there are so many more people than businesses that if you sell them the right product you can mint money. But the personal computers of that time still didn’t have enough power at a low enough price to excite the vast majority of consumers, or to change their lives in any meaningful way. The business market, however, was a different beast. The potential volume of sales represented by all those corporate desktops, in all those thousands of companies big and small, became the target of Bill Gates’s strategic brilliance and focus. Those companies paid good prices for the reliability and consistency that Windows PCs could deliver. They welcomed incremental improvement, and Bill knew how to give it to them. Steve paid lip service to it, but his heart wasn’t in it. He thrilled only to the concept of how a dramatically better computer could unlock even more potential for its user.

This fundamental difference between the two coparents of the PC was made utterly clear by the interview. What wasn’t made clear, and what Bill didn’t even come close to revealing, was how his deep understanding of the computing needs of businesses would transform the computer business itself over the next several years, further sidelining anyone who, like Steve, chose to focus on the aesthetics and thrills of personal computers. Even though nobody recognized it at the time, Bill was about to take the personal right out of personal computing. Ironically, in so doing, he would leave an opening for Steve to fill—eventually.

THE DECADE OF the 1990s was about to become the Age of Microsoft, a period of time when a single company dictated the direction of the entire computing industry. Microsoft did have a key partner in Intel, whose chips powered almost every machine running the Windows operating system. But the combination of Windows and a growing suite of office productivity applications gave Microsoft an entree to corporations that Intel could never match. While the steadily increasing power and speed of Intel’s chips set a rhythm of inexorable advancements for technology, Windows and Microsoft’s other software shaped the look and feel of corporate computing. By attending to every need of both the Fortune 500 and small businesses, Bill Gates was becoming technology’s king. Intel CEO Andy Grove was, somewhat to his dismay, relegated to the avuncular role of the “elder statesman.”

Together, Gates and Grove had exploited something that Steve had ignored. Looking over the horizon, they could see that the architecture of PCs would improve so much in performance as to subsume almost every aspect of computing. In the past, high-end business machines were based on proprietary designs that didn’t benefit from the economies of scale of standardized parts. Gates and Grove knew that eventually—and it wasn’t going to take very long at all—the expensive, customized guts of engineering workstations would become juiced-up PC circuit boards, and that the same evolution would ultimately subsume business minicomputers, mainframes, and even supercomputers, those rare and superexpensive machines used for everything from modeling weather patterns to controlling nuclear devices. (For example, IBM’s Watson, the machine that in 2011 beat Jeopardy! phenomenon Ken Jennings, is one such computer based on a PC-like architecture.) As a result, pretty much every computer that companies relied on to manage their most critical operations would adopt the internal electronic architecture of a PC writ large. All were much, much cheaper and easier to program and operate than unwieldy mainframes, because they were built out of the very same semiconductor components as PCs, and usually used a variation of the Windows operating system software. Thus they benefited from the ever-improving economics of scale afforded by the combination of Moore’s law and by the breathtaking growth of the PC market itself.

Throughout the 1990s, Microsoft would become the unchallenged steward of corporate computing. And corporations would welcome its standardization. In a headlong rush to improve productivity through technology, they spent trillions of dollars. In 1991, the $124 billion of corporate spending on information technology accounted for just 2 percent of the gross domestic product. By 2000, that percentage had more than doubled to 4.6 percent. The leading beneficiary of all that was Microsoft; over that same period, its revenues rose from $1.8 billion to $23 billion, its profits rose from $463 million to $9.4 billion, and its stock price appreciated 3,000 percent.

Mired at NeXT, Steve enjoyed hardly any of the spoils of this frenzy. He did sell a few computers to businesses, and once the Internet emerged as the world’s great network, the company’s WebObjects software turned into a useful tool for corporations developing custom websites. But these were table scraps. For the most part, Steve Jobs could only watch from the sidelines as his old friend and nemesis, a man far more suited to the demands of the corporate market, became arguably the most important businessperson on the globe.

AFTER ABOUT TWO and a half hours, we wrapped up the interview. I had covered the two men for years, but bringing these dynamic and headstrong competitors together for a conversation had been like seeing them for the first time in three dimensions. A kind of a parallax effect in their interaction helped me better discern and appreciate each. Perhaps it was because they weren’t there to sell anything that I could see them with more nuance. Their proximity and innate competitiveness had brought out spontaneous displays of wit, sharp-edged opinions, and even a sense of friendship that they might not have allowed to show in a different setting.

George Lange, who had been circling the two, camera in hand, during much of the encounter, now wanted to set up the shoot for the cover photograph. We didn’t have much time—Bill was adamant about getting to the San Francisco airport in time for his scheduled flight back to Seattle. George had considered shooting them outside, but he decided that the main staircase, which curved dramatically up from the living room, would work better for the cover. He explained his reasons to both. Bill was never that particular about press photo shoots—his primary concern was that they happen quickly. But Steve fancied himself a self-taught expert on the art form. The most intense negotiations I ever had with him when proposing a story for Fortune were about the photography. Steve had all kinds of advice about the pictures that would accompany an article, especially about the stylistic approach to his cover portrait. He could be more than a little vain about how he was portrayed, and always sought the upper hand in deciding not only who would do the shooting, but how the portraits would be set up. This time, however, he didn’t put up a fuss. He climbed right up the red clay steps and sat down. As soon as George looked at him he exclaimed, “Steve, you’re not wearing shoes! Don’t you want to wear some shoes for the cover of Fortune?” Steve shrugged and said, “Sure, fine.” He ran upstairs, grabbed a pair of sneakers, and came back wearing them—with the laces left untied.

After the shoot, I told Bill I’d run him over to the airport in my Volvo station wagon, but we had to wait a minute so George could take a photo of the three of us in Steve’s backyard, for the editor’s page of the magazine. Then Bill and I rushed off to the airport. We didn’t say much—I could tell that he had moved on and was already thinking about what was next for him. “You guys get along pretty well,” I remarked. “Why shouldn’t we?” he answered. He was preoccupied, but polite as always. “Thanks. I’m really glad we did that,” he said as he jumped out of the car.

George’s photo turned out to be my favorite from the many cover stories I worked on with either Bill or Steve. Wrought-iron railings swoop around the two young cybertycoons, who are perched shoulder to shoulder on the staircase, Steve one step higher than Bill. The expressions on their faces seem without pretense to me, and very revealing of their personalities. Bill looks like the cat who ate the canary. And Steve, who seemingly could sell anyone (except Bill, that is) the Golden Gate Bridge, has the sly smile of a clever young man who would never outgrow his penchant for making mischief.

Despite his business woes, Steve did have reasons to smile. If he was adrift professionally, he was starting to settle personally, in a way that gave him great satisfaction. His daughter Lisa had just come to live with him and Laurene. This was a complicated kind of atonement on his part, given the way he had immaturely and irresponsibly tried to deny his paternity. And the impending arrival of his son, Reed, excited this very untypical man in a deeply normal way. Reed, of course, was the first child he had planned for, and when he arrived in October, Steve reacted as so many fathers do—he became a know-it-all, in that deadly serious way that’s deeply amusing to parents who have been through the exercise. “They were classic new parents,” remembers Mike Slade. “They did everything wrong. They were both hippies, right? So the kid was in their bed the whole time, the kid was only breastfed. So what did the kid do? Let’s see, he screamed all the time and he was hungry all the time ’cause, duh, right? So within a week they looked like prison camp survivors.

“Steve is kind of a baby himself, right?” Slade continued. “And the guy was getting no sleep. So he instantly became a madman. It was right out of the CIA torture training manual. I’m not kidding. Within a week of Reed being born he was like, ‘I’ve gotta hire a president and COO. I’ve gotta do it. Ooh, it’s too much.’ ” But even this was a reflection of the very standard delight he took in his son, and the seriousness he was going to apply to the endeavor of raising Reed.

There was one other reason for Steve to be happy then, although nobody—including Steve—understood it at the time.

Bill’s strategy—to have Microsoft steer the industry toward a standardization that fit the needs of business—would shape everything about computing in the 1990s. Workstations did become subsumed by PCs. Mainframes did turn into nothing more than vast arrays of circuit boards built upon the PC architecture. The personal computer giants of that decade, companies like Dell and Compaq and HP and Gateway, churned out one artless machine after another, competing on brute measures like speed, power, and delivery times. The billions of people around the world who came to depend on the PC interacted daily with interchangeable boxes powered by the same chips, and they executed their tasks through applications governed by the same operating system. Apple, which had been the one company producing unique computers for individuals, foundered as Sculley and the hapless CEOs who succeeded him chased the same market as everyone else. By the late 1990s, it was almost as if the Orwellian scenario of the Mac’s “1984” commercial had come true. Big Business, with a pair of capital B’s, ruled computing. The drones used what they were told. The personal had been stripped out of personal computing. Year after year after year, Microsoft’s domination increased with one inevitable and inexorable and dull step after another. It seemed that Windows might rule forever. The rise of Bill Gates was as dull as the computing he enabled. At least that’s how Steve felt about the work of his far more successful rival.

All this standardization left an opening, of course. An opening for someone who preferred creating machines that delighted real people, rather than primarily serve the needs of business. An opening for someone just like Steve Jobs. At the time of our interview, Steve was still a confused fellow. His lingering resentment of the way he had been treated by Sculley and the Apple board, his frustration about the misfortunes and secondary importance of NeXT, and his egotistical need to matter in an industry whose direction was being dictated by someone else made it impossible for him then to see a way out of his dilemma. For the next few years, he would press ahead with his goal of making winners of NeXT and Pixar. But eventually he would sense his way to the opening that Gates had left behind—the opening for a company that could once again make insanely great computing machines for you and me. And when he found that opening, and made the most of it, he was rewarded with a kind of adulation that Gates would never come close to receiving.