In a recent interview, Bill Gates shared an interesting anecdote about his relationship with the late Steve Jobs, revealing that Jobs once suggested he should have taken LSD to improve his design sense. Gates recalled Jobs saying, “Steve Jobs once said that he wished I’d take acid because then maybe I would have had more taste in my design of my products.”
Gates humorously responded, “Look, I got the wrong batch. I got the coding batch, and this guy got the marketing-design batch, so good for him2.” He acknowledged that while Jobs had a talent for marketing and design, his own strengths lay in coding and software development.
Gates admitted that he envied Jobs’ design skills, saying, “Jobs wouldn’t know what a line of code meant, and his ability to think about design and marketing… I envy those skills. I’m not in his league.” Despite their differences, Gates admired Jobs’ visionary approach to product design, which revolutionised the tech industry with iconic products like the iMac, iPod, iPad, and iPhone.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates: I told Steve Jobs…
Meanwhile, in another interview recently, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently shared candid thoughts about his relationship with Steve Jobs. Reflecting on Steve Jobs, Gates called the late Apple co-founder a “singular figure” who had an extraordinary ability to captivate people. “He should have been an actor,” Gates said. “He really ran the reality distortion field like no one else.”
While Gates admired Jobs’ “messianic” skills in marketing and leadership, he also noted the late Apple co-founder’s lack of technical expertise. “Steve’s achievements are all the more impressive when you know that he couldn’t look at a piece of code and know what it was,” Gates said. “He was never an engineer. Woz [Steve Wozniak] was a real engineer — I mean, a hardcore engineer.”