Comparison of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs

 Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both created powerhouse companies that mostly everyone uses in modern times. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are intelligent ingenious thinkers who have changed the world. Having established their organizations at the same time, these two have become the pioneers in their fields, furnished the world with revolutionary opportunities and made billions on their creations. Apple and Microsoft have become multi-billion dollar corporations built by the ideas of their founders. 

Bill Gates is the founder of Microsoft. Gates began programming when he was in middle school. By high school, he and co-founder of Microsoft Paul Allen were writing code to create schedules for schools and traveling around the country writing code and software for various different businesses. Bill knew that computers was his passion however his parents pressured him into attending college to pursue a law degree. Bill Gates attended Harvard and started a start-up company that failed miserably. He began strongly considering becoming a lawyer like his father. He read a magazine about a computer company that needed a system software. Gates contacted them and told them he had a language for the computer he could sell them even though he didn’t. Gates successfully coded the language under time constraints and was able to sell it to Altair in time. This in a lot of ways is the seed from which Microsoft grew. Interestingly enough, Steve Jobs hired Bill Gates to write Apple first system software but upon the accusation of stealing ideas, Jobs fired Gates. Contrary to Jobs, Bill Gates was in love with writing code and learning the ins and outs of the software. Jobs was more fascinated with the hardware of the device and crafting a beautiful machine while outsourcing software development. Nonetheless, after starting Microsoft he stepped down as CEO and became chairman so he and his wife could focus all of their efforts on the Bill and Melinda gates foundation. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is dedicated to taking on global challenges such as clean drinking water, sanitary living conditions, and eradicating diseases. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation actively looks for solutions to these problems and works with some of the top engineers and doctors around the world to find cost-effective and life-saving solutions to global problems. Bill dedicates most of his time to researching and thinking about how these problems can be solved and how the organization can make a difference simply by thinking differently. In a new Netflix documentary, “Billa Brain,” episode 1, the Bill and Melinda gates foundation worked with top engineers to design a plant that turns human waste into clean drinking water! It’s safe to say that Bill Gates outside the box thinking has trickled down throughout the rest of the foundation and will continue to be the driving force behind solving the challenges we face in today’s world. 

Steve Jobs is widely considered to be one of the greatest visionaries of our time. He wasn’t a traditional textbook thinker. His ideas were original and he had an extreme eye for details. His vision for beautiful design and sophisticated simplicity is the driving force behind Apple’s success today. Steve Jobs was adopted and for much of his life, many around him felt that his erratic personality was a result of feelings of being unwanted by his biological parents. Steve’s early adulthood path is very similar to Bill Gates. Jobs decided to drop out of Reed College citing not wanting to take his parent’s money as being the reason why. He started Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976 without any real knowledge of how to program or build computers. Jobs had a great mind for design and he knew how he wanted the products to run and look but he didn’t know how to do it himself, that is why Wozniak was so fundamental to the beginning of Apple. Steve Wozniak once said in an interview, “Steve Jobs played no role at all in any of my designs of the Apple I and Apple II computer and printer interfaces and serial interfaces and floppy disks and stuff that I made to enhance the computers. He did not know technology. He’d never designed anything as a hardware engineer, and he didn’t know the software. He wanted to be important, and the important people are always the business people. So that’s what he wanted to do.” Jobs was an elite businessman and orchestrator. Jobs, Wozniak, and others in the company had a falling out in 1985 and the board decided that it was best to relieve Jobs of his duties at Apple, the company he had started. Without Jobs’s leadership and vision, Apple failed miserably creating unlikable products while stock prices continued to plummet. Jobs returned in 1997 after they inevitably begged him to come back and save the company from being just another ‘what if’ story. Where Jobs really excelled was in the marketing department. Jobs was a phenomenal marketer and paid great attention to details. He somehow managed to combine simplicity, sophistication, and elegance in every ad Apple ever aired and every product they ever produced. Jobs understood the power of marketing hence why Apple is by far and away from the most popular and preferential technology company on the planet. Apple marketing combined with the simplicity of the software as well as hardware is why Apple products are preferred over almost every other product on the market regardless of price. After bringing the company back from the dead and releasing the most revolutionary product within the last century, the iPhone, Apple was back to its trendsetting and revolutionary ways thanks to Steve Jobs.  Unfortunately, Jobs passed away on October 5th, 2011 from Pancreatic cancer, right before the launch of the iPhone 4s. 

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs will go down as two of the greatest visionaries and innovators of our time. Their relentless dedication to their craft and love for technology has changed the way we live our daily lives for the better. Their tremendous minds set the standard for thinking differently and will continue to have a lasting impact on the world for centuries.