‘Steve Jobs was tough on himself’: Bill Gates drops big truth bombs on his former rival to Zerodha’s Nikhil Kamath

The love-hate relationship between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, two of the biggest names in personal computing from the late 1970s, epitomised the two schools of thought that went into the confluence of business and technology. While Gates was methodical and pragmatic in his approach to license his operating system and software to a bevy of manufacturers, Jobs was a perfectionist who espoused absolute control over the product, akin to an artist. This culminated in Apple packaging both its software and hardware as part of the product experience.

However, the two men softened towards the end of Jobs’ life, with mutual admiration and respect replacing the often-no-holds-barred disdain for each other in the years when they helmed their companies. “He was tough on himself. He did have the most unbelievable sense of people, just in an intuitive way, and of good design. So, his skills and mine don't even overlap that much. He was not an engineer and I'm not a design person,” Gates divulged in entrepreneur and investor Nikhil Kamath’s podcast, People by WTF.

On asked if Gates is tough on himself like Jobs, he said that if one wants to work and “not fool themselves” one must be “pretty hard” on themselves. “It makes you at first maybe not a very good manager because you tend to manage people like you manage yourself, where you are just so tough on them,” he added. In his early days at Microsoft, Gates claimed that he could get “a lot” out of people who were tough on themselves, but it also meant incongruence with those who were not like him. “I probably missed some people who were very different than me that could have been part of the company,” he said.

While Jobs was artistic in his approach to technology, Jobs was a gifted programmer, and during the halcyon days of their rivalry, the two often took jibes at each other for lacking the skill the other had. It is commonly known that Jobs found Gates his inferior in matter of tastes and style, whereas Gate mocked him for not knowing programming. Gates would later reveal that Jobs once suggested him to take LSD to improve product design.

However, nearly 14 years after Jobs’ passing, the derision has purportedly ceased to exist. “I wish I was a design person,” Gates said ruefully, adding that he is unsure if Jobs wanted to be an engineer. “So, his skills and mine don't even overlap that much. He was not an engineer and I'm not a design person,” he added.

The two of them also differed in the way they interacted with people. Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, recounts how Gates found Jobs ‘fundamentally odd’ and ‘weirdly flawed as a human being’, and how his personality teetered between ‘in the mode of saying that you were shit’ and ‘trying to seduce you,’ but having a mesmerising effect on people.  “He did have the most unbelievable sense of people, just in an intuitive way…he was a natural. I had to learn how to give speeches and all that. Even at my best, I'm not as much of a speech giver as he was,” he said.