Gates, Jobs square off

For more than two decades, Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Microsoft chairperson Bill Gates have sparred over the issues that were crucial to the development of the technology industry. Issues such as whether it's wiser for a company to partner or build everything itself. Or the primacy of software versus hardware in personal computers. Or which is more important: how easy it is to use a product or what it can do once you figure out how?

This jousting over big ideas, sometimes friendly but often not, has always been from a distance. Although Gates made a famous phone call to Jobs in 1997 and the two shared a stage briefly at a 1983 Apple promotional event, the two industry icons have never had a public conversation.

So when they sit down next Wednesday for a 75-minute joint interview in front of a gathering of tech executives, their long history and competing philosophies should make for an interesting - if not history-making - discussion. The conversation at the fifth annual "D - All Things Digital" conference in Carlsbad, California, comes as Gates and Jobs are head in very different directions, and as the companies they co-founded both face big challenges.

Gates, who long ago turned the Microsoft chief-executive chair over to Steve Ballmer, surrendered his chief-software-architect role last June to focus on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The charity - devoted to curing diseases, mostly in developing countries - got a big boost last year when Gates, the world's wealthiest person, convinced fellow billionaire Warren Buffett to donate most of his estate.

While the 51-year-old Gates is slated to become a part-time Microsoft employee next year, Jobs, 52, is as engaged as ever at Apple as CEO, product-design guru and public pitchman. The iPod, Apple's iconic digital music player, has changed the way people buy and listen to music. Its massive popularity - 100 million units sold, and counting - has revitalised the company and sent its shares (AAPL) soaring over the past four years.

Now, Jobs is readying the release of the iPhone, a combination cellphone and music player that will put Apple in direct competition with much larger rivals such as Nokia and Motorola.

Apple's success in the media-player market has been a late-career vindication of Jobs' philosophy that hardware- and software-product design be closely integrated from the start. His insistence on that approach led to his ouster from Apple in 1985 and helped relegate the company to a single-digit-market-share niche of the PC market. Meanwhile, Gates' strategy of focusing on software while partnering with machine makers propelled the Windows operating system to world domination.

By the late 1990s, with Apple struggling while Microsoft's sales and share price were soaring thanks to Windows 95, the battle of ideas seemed to be over - even though the OS then showcased the easy-to-use graphical interface that Apple had rolled out years earlier.

Perhaps it was that bitter irony that inspired Jobs to try for a second act. After rejoining Apple when it bought out his PC company, called Next, Jobs shocked the Apple faithful by cutting a wide-ranging deal with Gates, who invested $150m in Apple and agreed to keep making software for the Macintosh. The agreement, made public in a phone call that Gates placed to Jobs while the latter was onstage at an Apple event, made the cover of Time and Newsweek and helped rescue Apple from oblivion. And the strategy that backfired on Jobs so badly in the PC market turned out to be precisely the right one in the market for digital music, at least so far.

Apple has grabbed a dominant share of the portable-music-player market in large part because the iPod device, its user interface and the software for the online iTunes music store work together seamlessly.

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