Bill Gates Wrote Steve Jobs A Letter He Kept By His Death Bed

It’s been awhile now since Bill Gates ruled the roast over at Microsoft, however his philanthropic work across the globe has more than made up for his absence. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has almost completely rid the world of polio, and malaria and aids can’t be far behind at this rate. The founder of Microsoft has arguably made one of the most significant contributions to the world in the past hundred years, but even despite all his own personal accomplishments, he continues to reminisce over the death of Steve Jobs in interviews.

According to Gates Steve Jobs was one of the few people to understand his compulsions, and has started slowly opening up to the press in his defense over his description in the late Apple co-founder’s biography. “Steve was an incredible genius who contributed immensely to the field I was in. We had periods, like the early Macintosh, when we had more people working on it than they did. And then we were competitors. The personal computers I worked on had a vastly higher [market] share than Apple until really the last five or six years, where Steve’s very good work on the Mac and on iPhones and iPads did extremely well. It’s quite an achievement, and we enjoyed each [other’s work].”

Gate’s comments might sound a bit like a tribute, but reading between the lines you can also sense his confidence in the decisions he made which lead to Microsoft’s dominance. “He spent a lot of his time competing with me. There are lots of times when Steve said [critical] things about me. If you took the more harsh examples, you could get quite a litany.” In Jobs’s view, his rival was “unimaginative”, “a bit narrow” and derivative. As he once told an interviewer, “He [Gates] would be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram.”