The past few decades can be considered a process that these two people have gone through from "cautious allies" to "close to friends."

In their own minds, it is difficult for others to define whether they are opponents or friends.

But for Bill Gates, "friends" include, of course, in addition to his entrepreneurial partners like Paul Allen, those equally legendary competitors.

And the most legendary one is probably Steve Jobs.

As said before, they are not eternal enemies.

In the early days of Microsoft, it was when II was the most popular.

At that time, Gates often flew to Cupertino (located in the southern Bay Area, where Apple is headquartered) to see what Apple was doing and communicate with Jobs.

In the 1980s, Jobs flew to Washington to seek cooperation with Gates on the microprocessor for Macintosh computers.

The significance of this computer is that for the first time the graphical user interface has been widely applied to personal computers.

Gates recalled: He was not particularly impressed at the time, but he just thought it had a strange temptation.

At that time, Jobs said to him: I don’t need you to help me complete the sale, but I will let you participate in this matter.

Gates once said: He understands Jobs' technology like an outdated UNIX system that you will never use on your computer.

And he (referring to Jobs) was like a super salesman who actually didn't understand the product itself.

After that, Gates came to know and admire Jobs, although they always had differences of opinion.

But when Apple launched iTunes, Gates still issued an internal statement from Microsoft, saying: Steve Jobs will use his focus and judgment on things to set off a remarkable revolution in the electronic product market.

Extended information: Steve Jobs believed that innovation has no limits and is limited by imagination.

He believes that if it is a growth industry, innovation is to make products more efficient, easier to use, and easier to work with.

If it is a shrinking industry, innovation means quickly withdrawing from the original model and changing yourself quickly before the products and services become outdated and difficult to use.

Jobs believed that the first ten employees of a startup determine the level of the company, because each person must be able to do one-tenth of the company's work.

He also often uses the Beatles as a metaphor for the power of a team: no major job can be completed by a single person, or by two, three, or four people.

In order to get things done, the work cannot be done by just one person, but people with extraordinary abilities must be found to cooperate.

In the end, the power generated by individual interactions is aggregated, so that the overall power will be far greater than the sum of the individual powers.

Bill Gates said: Most of our competitors are doing very poorly.

They don’t know how to introduce talents with business and technical talents, let alone how to fully organize and combine the advantages of these talents.

They also don’t know how to market themselves around the world.

We always overestimate the changes that will happen in the next one or two years, and always underestimate the changes that will happen in the next 10 years.

So don’t let yourself get stuck in doing nothing.

I wish I had the chance to code more.

I was indeed minding my own business.

They were not allowed to put the code I wrote into the upcoming software product.

They have been doing this for the past 8 years.

And when I said that I would join them and use the weekends to write code, they seemed very surprised. They really no longer believed in my programming ability as before.

I have to say, it was actually fun to be the underdog on the search engines, we had a huge development team working on it, and I'm sure I'll remember the effort.