In November 1983, Jobs received a "tip": his close partner Bill Gay had violated the cooperation agreement and released a new product: Windows!
He was furious, and immediately asked his men to call Gates, and yelled at Gates: You lied to us, I trusted you so much, but you stole our Apple stuff!
Gates stood there calmly, looked directly into Jobs's eyes, and said a quote that was later regarded as a classic:
“
Well, Steve, I think there's another way to look at this, we both had a rich neighbor named Xerox, and one day, I broke into his house to steal the television, only to find that you had taken it Stolen!
What Gates and Jobs "stole" is called graphical user interface (GUI) technology, which comes from Xerox.
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In the late 1960s, when Jobs and Gates were still in high school, Xerox was already a giant in the copier market.
Its Xerox 914 was so easy to use that Xerox said in an advertisement that even a monkey could make a copy by pressing a button, which is enough to show how simple and easy to use this product was. In 1965, Xerox's revenue had reached more than $500 million.
However, the good times did not last long. Xerox, which monopolized the copier market, was targeted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. In the end, Xerox was forced to license its patented technology to other manufacturers. Among them, Japanese manufacturers suddenly emerged. Canon and other manufacturers launched cheaper products, which gave Xerox a strong presence in the United States. The share dropped from 100% to less than 14%.
In order to cope with severe challenges, Xerox management began to engage in the digital computer business and authorized chief scientist Jack Goldman to set up a research institute to develop new technologies so that Xerox could continue to be at the forefront of the times.
Jack Goldman established the famous Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC for short).
PARC caught up with the good times. Due to the condemnation of the Vietnam War and the economic recession, military expenditures were cut, and the military's investment in university research was greatly reduced. Xerox offered high salaries and attracted a large number of top researchers and engineers in Silicon Valley. .
Alan Kay, who later won the 2003 Turing Award, said: In the mid-1970s, nearly half of the world's top 100 computer scientists worked at PARC!
PARC has also established a very free culture that encourages innovation. Coupled with these extremely outstanding minds, a large number of breakthrough technologies and great inventions have been produced here: Graphical User Interface (GUI), WYSIWYG, Ethernet , PostScript, object-oriented languages, laser printers, VLSI design...
One of the products integrates various technologies, and this is the famous Xerox Alto:
This is a product ahead of its time. While other computers were still operating with characters, it already had GUI, mouse, object-oriented and other technologies.
Unfortunately, Xerox executives seemed to still focus on copiers and printers. They felt that the Alto was expensive (priced at as high as $40,000). They only produced 2,000 units and then ceased operations. They did not think of bringing it to the market for commercialization. .
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Many disappointed researchers left PARC and joined some startups. For example, Charles Simonyi joined Microsoft and led the team to build Office. Bob Belville joined Apple as engineering manager of the Macintosh division.
It is said that when Jobs invited Bob to join Apple, he said: Everything you have done in your life is rubbish, why don't you come and work for me?
It was obvious that Jobs was on PUA Bob, because when he was constantly impressed by the awesome technology of Amway PARC’s Alto computer, he couldn’t help but go to PARC to visit.
People from PARC showed Jobs object-oriented technology and local area network technology, but he was not interested.
When he saw the GUI interface, he was completely shocked: This is the best thing I have ever seen in my life!
Of course, Jobs later said: PARC's GUI is still very imperfect, incomplete, has many shortcomings, and many ways of doing things are wrong... Within 10 minutes I realized that one day, all computers will Work this way.
Returning to Apple, Jobs immediately adjusted his strategy to make Apple's products completely dependent on GUI technology.
In order to convince the development team, he sold 100,000 shares of Apple stock to Xerox, just to have Xerox give a demonstration to the entire team.
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At the same time, a "small company" called Microsoft was also developing third-party software for Apple's Macintosh. Jobs was worried that Microsoft would copy Macintosh technology to the PC.
So in 1981, he made Gates make a promise: Microsoft couldn't release any software that used a mouse until a year after the Macintosh was released.
In the agreement, the planned release date for the Macintosh was November 1983, but Apple's lawyers forgot an important point: the project was delayed.
The Machintosh was indeed delayed, and it was not launched on the market until January 1984.
Seeing that November 1983 had passed, Gates seized the opportunity and gave Jobs a "surprise" by launching Windows at the biennial computer trade show COMDEX (it shows that Microsoft has also been developing this operating system).
Not only did it release Windows, Microsoft also launched WYSIWYG Word 1.0. Do you think this is annoying or not?
So, the scene at the beginning of the article happened, where an angry Jobs asked Gates to give an explanation.
In 1988, Apple formally sued Microsoft for plagiarism. Six years later, the judge dismissed the case.
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Are Jobs and Gates thieves?
In fact, in 1975 alone, PARC's Alto computer was demonstrated over 2,000 times!
It can be said that countless people know the existence of these great technologies such as GUI, mouse, and WYSIWYG.
However, they only knew it. Only Jobs and Gates successfully commercialized them and brought them to the market.
Gates built the Microsoft empire based on Windows and Word, and Jobs built the Apple empire with the Macintosh and later the iPhone.
Finally, let’s end with a quote from Picasso that Steve Jobs often quoted:
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