I actually had dinner with a well-known hedge fund manager a few months ago and while talking about Blackberries and iPhones, he mentioned "that nobody has ever got rich betting against Steve Jobs"
Sums it up for me pretty well.
Sums it up for me pretty well.
Not really.
Gates already had a "Microsoft tax" in place for generic x86 computers, so, any sale of an x86 box running a generic Apple OS would also imply in a sale of an OEM license of DOS. At that time, Gates was developing Windows (perhaps doubting they could pull it off, thus, misleading Apple into spending money on something they regarded as very difficult or impossible) to compete with Apple's proprietary hardware/software stack.
Without hardware differentiation, Apple would quickly fail.
So, no, I don't think that was honest advice and, much to his credit, neither did Jobs.
It is easy to forget that in 1985, the modern assumption that all computers are identical Intel-specified x86 boxes was not yet in place.
Microsoft was happy to place bets on every system they could. Bill Gates didn't bet against anyone. He placed lots of bets on lots of systems, knowing that one would work out. The IBM PC is what made their fortune. But the bets they placed on other systems were already doing very well for them. Including on Apple.
The Microsoft-Apple relationship began in 1977 with Microsoft introducing Applesoft BASIC and later licensing it to Apple. Microsoft SoftCard followed in 1980, enabling Apple machines to run to programs designed for the CP/M. Sure, there was the infamous MS-DOS deal with IBM. But in the same time period Steve Jobs visited Microsoft to demo early prototypes of the Macintosh, and Microsoft was the first major company to develop programs for the Mac. In the end Microsoft BASIC and Microsoft Multiplan were shipped simultaneously with the introduction of the Macintosh, and Microsoft announced at the launch that Word, Chart, and File would ship soon.
When I look back at the history, I see no sign that Bill Gates was betting against Steve Jobs. His most successful bet was not on Steve Jobs. But he had lots of bets on Jobs as well.
For more on the history, see http://www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft_company.h...
Many people did get rich betting on Gates, so indirectly, yes, Bill Gates does show that people have gotten rich betting against Jobs. The hyperbole is nice, but only that--hyperbole.
An investor who could only envisage one winner may be a little naive. It's not a horse race.
Yes it was.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh
"The first Macintosh was introduced on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command-line interface. The company continued to have success through the second half of the 1980s, only to see it dissipate in the 1990s as the personal computer market shifted towards IBM PC compatible machines running MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows."
Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985. Windows 1.0 was released in the same year. However Windows struggled at that point. According to Microsoft (see http://www.microsoft.com/windows/winhistorydesktop.mspx for confirmation) the first successful version of Windows was Windows 3.0. That was released in 1990, and its main competitor was a severely mismanaged Apple. At that point Bill Gates was emphatically not competing against Steve Jobs.
As Jobs said at the time: "We have to let go of a few notions here. We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft needs to lose.”
Pretty much, yes. It made him seem like less of a monopolist.
Worked out to be a winning bet for Gates.
That's what happens when you bet on every horse in the race. It's something that Microsoft does a lot.
In the early '90 support for Apple's hardware / OS was a second class citizen and it still is in many areas.
This was 'a bet against Steve Jobs', and it made Bill Gates (and many others) quite, quite rich.
Besides that, I will say that even if Jobs wasn't involved in the actual designing of Apple products, he's a very charismatic director and has a good intuition on what really excites people. Such qualities are generally rare to find in the human population.