<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; ">Here's a link that references the new Microsoft Surface table PC product. Kinda cool, IMO.<DIV><A href="http://www.microsoft.com/surface/"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.3px;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#002BF0">http://www.microsoft.com/surface/</FONT></SPAN></FONT></A><BR><DIV><DIV>On Jun 1, 2007, at 10:41 AM, Russ & Marilyn Carlson wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">When Steve Met Bill</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">By Jason Snell (<A href="mailto:jsnell@macworld.com">jsnell@macworld.com</A>)</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Steve Jobs and Bill Gates shared a stage at the D: All Things Digital conference this week. And while their joint-appearance may have been disappointing to anyone expecting a two-billionaires-enter-one-billionaire-leaves battle of wits, it was a fascinating opportunity to view two men who are very much in the public eye, perhaps destined to be inextricably linked to one another in the history books, interact with each other for the first time in a public setting in a decade.</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Read our coverage of the Jobs-Gates session</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Covering the session for Macworld, what struck me most about Jobs's and Gates's interaction with one another was the genuine warmth they both felt when nostalgically recalling the early days of the personal computer revolution, when Microsoft supplied a version of the BASIC programming language for the Apple II and then became one of the flagship application developers for the very first Mac. In an industry that has trouble remembering what happened last week, these men have 30 years of history -- much of it good, believe it or not.</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">It's easy to portray these two as bitter rivals, and their two companies certainly provide contrasting styles and approaches to technology that match the personalities of their founders. Jobs showed himself to be a very thoughtful, almost philosophical speaker at times. Likewise true to form, Gates exposed his unabashed geeky love of the nuts and bolts of the engineering behind the technology. But both seemed to recognize the strengths of the other.</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">For me, the most telling statement of the night was from Gates, when each man was asked about what he admired about the other. "I'd give a lot to have Steve's taste, his intuitive taste, both for people and products," said Gates. He told a story about one of those early meetings when the original Mac was being developed, in which Gates would approach problems from a technical perspective, as "an engineering guy." And in contrast, he'd see Steve Jobs make an intuitive decision, based on "his sense of people" and how they'd respond to using the technology. "And it was magical," Gates recalled. "Wow!"</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Jobs, hearkening back to Apple's decision not to license the Mac OS to other hardware companies, which led to the rise of Microsoft Windows, said that he regretted that Apple had too much of a lone-wolf mentality in those days. "Because Woz and I started the company based on doing the whole banana, we weren't so good at partnering with people.... And if Apple had more of that in its DNA, it would've served us really well. And [Apple] didn't learn that until a couple decades later."</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">This is not to say that the night was entirely a love-fest, not on the same day where Jobs likened the Windows version of iTunes to "giving a glass of icewater to somebody in hell." Most notably the pair clashed about, of all things, Apple's successful series of television ads featuring the Mac Guy (Justin Long) and the PC Guy (John Hodgman). Gates was visibly uncomfortable during the entire discussion of the ads, not buying Jobs's suggestion that "The art of those commercials is not to be mean, but is actually for the guys to like each other." When both Jobs and co-moderator Kara Swisher expressed that they liked the PC guy, Gates shot back, "His mother loves him." And when Jobs carted out his well-worn Alan Kay quote about people who make software desiring to design their own hardware, Gates let rip with another dry rejoinder: "I can resist that." But Gates did admit that, in certain areas, Apple's approach to unified hardware and software design was appropriate, which is why Microsoft has adopted it for products such as the Zune, Xbox, and the new Microsoft Surface table PC product.</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">However, the pair did find a lot of common ground, especially when defending the honor of the technology product that defines both of them: the personal computer. While excitedly discussing the future of tiny, "post-PC" devices, Jobs and Gates both said that the death of the PC is probably a long way off. Gates ticked off other devices that were going to kill the PC, like the network computer, and the single-function computer. Jobs said that "the PC will continue to be with us, and it'll morph with us." But Jobs also showed a greater enthusiasm for the possibilities in those new devices, such as the iPod and the iPhone.</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Ultimately, did this Gates-Jobs joint appearance live up to the electricity in the room beforehand? Even though it was a relatively gentle kind of evening, I'd have to say yes. To see these two icons of the computer industry, reacting to one another and playing off each other, in an informal setting free of PR handlers, was a chance to peek through their shells a little bit. And what we got was a good glimpse at two men who genuinely love technology and are driven by their enthusiasm in the work they have chosen.</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">_______________________________________________</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">DMMUG mailing list</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Use this Address to send mail to the list:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="mailto:DMMUG@dmmug.org">DMMUG@dmmug.org</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Use this page to modify subscription options:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/dmmug">http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/dmmug</A></DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR></DIV></BODY></HTML>