Thursday, May 31, 2007

Steve and Bill


Steve Jobs and Bill Gates interviewed together. Gee whiz.

I'm watching all seven segments instead of the "highlights" one. In the second segment, Jobs talks wisely about the nature of competition.
I think that competition is healthy, but if one has a war-like attitude about it, if the goal is to destroy the "enemy", then the whole game is much less spiritually constructive for all parties. If one on the other hand has an outgoing attitude to it, if one thinks about baking more pies rather than fighting over just one pie, then everybody wins.

It was wonderful to see, in segment seven, Bill and Steve both being able to honestly answer the question about what they could have learned from each other's company, and give a real compliment which even also actually could teach us something. Both of them admitted something that people with big egos would not easily have done. Steve admitted that for the longest time, MS was much better at working with other companies than Apple was. And Bill admitted that Steve has much better intuitive "taste" than he.
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Talking about Apple, man, they have the fastest server network I know of. I just downloaded the upgrade to iTunes... 30 megabytes in about 30 seconds!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a great interview. So many insights, such a great vibe, and a very touching end.

Anonymous said...

Eolake said: "Talking about Apple, man, they have the fastest server network I know of. I just downloaded the upgrade to iTunes... 30 megabytes in about 30 seconds!"

That's 8 Mbit/s net. With IP packet overhead it's more like 10 Mbit/s.

I think they have a distributed system. You may have received the bits from a local, U.K. based, server without realising it.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

I am sure I did. Apple was one of the first companies to really make use of distributed servers for software and movie trailers. I think they started with Akamai back in 2000.