Bill Gates Vs. Steve Jobs: the Saga Continues

By now, everyone has seen the series of ads Apple has produced depicting the personifications of the Macintosh computer and the PC. The Mac is a young, hip, good-looking, jeans-clad male, while the PC is a professionally dressed, not-so-good-looking thirty-something with eyeglasses. Rock star and the geek. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Apparently the Apple folks still think there's juice in this formula. They're right. They've been capitalizing on the Jobs and Gates dynamic since the beginning of the 1980's, and I see no reason why it should end any time soon.

My favorite commercial is the one where Mac presents PC with a gift of a photo album made "with a couple clicks" on iPhoto, and PC gives Mac a GUI (graphic user interface) manual. The obvious hook, as always, is the user-friendliness of the Macintosh vs. the clueless and complicated PC. Historically, though, its funny because Apple, with Jobs as its poster-boy, was actually the first to champion GUI. Bill Gates simply jumped on the Steve Jobs Bandwagon of Bravura.

The battle rages on. Apple, with its overwhelming share of the marketplace with the iPod, now has a Microsoft contender with its "Zune" and an online store to match iTunes. Industry folks know it is business as usual with Bill Gates & Microsoft: Introduce products late & full of bugs, in a market that is growing because of another company's innovations, then bully your competition off the face of the planet. Microsoft has to know that Apple, this time, is quite a formidable foe, and I'm sure they're getting their war paint on. The new iPhone is yet another innovation sure to make Gates scratch his head, and I'm convinced we'll have a sub-par similar product from Microsoft within four to five years.

The great computer race.

Credit: martinus

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