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Comment by levesque | Hacker News Reader

On the love of Jobs vs hate of Gates (or Microsoft), I am currently reading Steve Jobs biography, and I found a passage that highlights Apple as hypocrites quite more efficiently than anything I might say :

" The Apple raid on Xerox PARC is sometimes described as one of the biggest heists in the chronicles of industry. Jobs occasionally endorsed this view, with pride. As he once said, “Picasso had a saying—‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” "

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Given Jobs' reaction to e.g. Android, that is, in the Apple parlance, "stunning".

It's all about stuff like "the winner writes history" and "the best marketing/coolest looking guy" too.

Obviously Apple and SJobs are far worse than Microsoft and BGates. SJobs has a vision and motivated by it, to do anything to achieve it. BGates is more of an ordinary man.

That's why BGates final goal in life is not to "hit android until its dead lying on the floor" but instead "lets donate most money which i dont even need to try to make the world a better place".

Fucking hell of a difference if you ask me.

Heck, with all their wrongs, current Windows is actually pretty damn good, and Microsoft Research has awesome stuff released every now and then.

"hit android until its dead lying on the floor"

You know Microsoft collects nearly a half billion a year from patents relating to android?

You know Bill Gates left Microsoft before the first Android phone shipped?

You're being too literal with the quote. The long form of that quote, which is in the link[1] that Bratwurst provided, is a lot closer to what Steve meant.

[1]: http://www.businessofdesignonline.com/picasso-good-artists-c...

I was confused by the quote too. I did some searching - The TS Elliot quote is what I think of when I think of Mac vs Windows, and iPhone vs Android.

http://www.businessofdesignonline.com/picasso-good-artists-c...

Also:

http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borro...

I also should add this link. http://www.sitepoint.com/copy-great-designers-steal/

Case Study 3 is fun.

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