Among questions on his favorite sandwiches (“Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger”) and whether he can still jump over a chair (probably not), Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates got asked whether his company had copied Steve Jobs during a Reddit Q&A on Monday.
Gates denied copying Cupertino — but reminded everybody that Microsoft and Apple both borrowed liberally from another Silicon Valley pioneer.
“The main ‘copying’ that went on relative to Steve and me is that we both benefited from the work that Xerox PARC did in creating graphical interface,” Gates said during the Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), which was his fifth time taking questions from the Reddit community. “It wasn’t just them but they did the best work. Steve hired Bob Belville, I hired Charles Simonyi. We didn’t violate any IP rights Xerox had but their work showed the way that led to the Mac and Windows.”
Gates is 100 percent correct. The common perception that Microsoft copied Apple comes from the fact that, for most casual users, the Mac was the first time they saw a WIMP interface (windows, icons, mouse pointer) in action. Very few people saw the revolutionary work that was being carried out at Xerox PARC.
A terrible deal for Apple
The fact that Microsoft wound up emulating a lot of the fine tweaks Apple added to the graphical user interface came down to a disastrous deal signed by Gates and then-Apple CEO John Sculley in the mid-’80s.
As I’ve written before in my daily “Today in Apple history” post, on November 21, 1985, Apple agreed to grant Microsoft a “non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, nontransferable license to use [parts of the Mac technology] in present and future software programs, and to license them to and through third parties for use in their software programs.”
At the time, the Windows operating system was hilariously clunky compared to what Apple was offering. Furthermore, Microsoft was a valued Mac developer. Keeping Gates on Cupertino’s side seemed worth surrendering some of Apple’s intellectual property in the unlikely event that Microsoft could pull together a halfway decent operating system in the near future.
All was well and good until Windows 2.0 arrived a few years later, looking far closer to the Macintosh interface. Apple promptly filed a copyright violation lawsuit on March 17, 1988, which included 189 different elements the company argued Microsoft was illegally using.
Apple marched Microsoft to court, only for 179 of 189 of Cupertino’s copyright-infringement allegations to be thrown out due to the earlier agreement. This paved the way for Microsoft’s dominance over Apple in the coming decade.
More on Xerox PARC
The Xerox PARC story, incidentally, is well worth reading if you’re a fan of computer history. I’d particularly recommend Michael Hiltzik’s Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age.
Even decades later, it seems that Xerox PARC’s debt to modern computing is a topic of conversation — not just in Gates’ AMA, but also in the naming of Apple’s new Apple Park campus, which sounds like a tribute to the legendary Silicon Valley R&D center.
Source: Reddit
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
12 responses to “Bill Gates says he didn’t copy Steve Jobs”
Park and PARC, with a wink, yes, but the new campus is quite park like in it’s trees and use of solar power to keep it’s carbon footprint down.
The only similarity between Park and PARC is how they are pronounced and they both use the letters P, A and R in that order. :-)
One is an area for recreational use that surrounds a corporate campus, and the other is the shortened name for an actual company.
If Apple wanted to be similar to PARC, they would call it ARC. Apple Research Center.
WRONG! Microsoft never saw PARC. They didn’t develop Windows until they saw the beta of Mac.
PARC’s technology was rolled out in other products as well. The Xerox Star is a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q
The Lisa was out in 1982 as well. How does your comment challenge bdkenndy11’s claim?
Except for every font…
“Gates is 100 percent correct. The common perception that Microsoft copied Apple comes from the fact that…”
Luke, I’m not sure how you can write that with a straight face. That’s pretty funny. What you fail to acknowledge were things like Gate’s reaction the first time he saw the Mac. Remember, Microsoft was a developer for the Mac and had both early access to it and deep insight into the types of APIs that were necessary to build a GUI. MS didn’t have advanced knowledge of Xerox’s work, but they were a developer for the Mac. It’s also not a coincidence that Microsoft’s GUI attempts far more closely resemble Apple’s work than Xerox’s work. Seriously, your “100 percent correct” comment just makes you look foolish.
Bill Gates is retconning history. Bill Gates and crew in Seattle were 1,000 miles away from PARC, and never got the tour that Adele Goldberg famously gave Steve Jobs.
It wasn’t until Gates saw the early versions of the Mac that he had his epiphany. That’s also why Microsoft was at least a year behind introducing a decent WIMP OS.
Please don’t lend legitimacy to Bill’s retcon by saying he’s 100% correct.
“Please don’t lend legitimacy to Bill’s retcon by saying he’s 100% correct.”
You do realize that I was quoting the ridiculous comments made by the author of this story with the “100 percent correct” comment, right? I would imagine the author is to young and perhaps a bit naive to have a reasonable account of history and how this played out. To your point, yes, it’s very clear that Microsoft copied Apple and not Xerox. As you mentioned, they never saw Xerox’s work before Apple had something on the market and they were a developer for the Mac before they ever had a GUI of their own. Finally, the fact that Microsoft’s GUI was a rip-off of the Mac rather than Xerox’s work in both form and function, where Microsoft stole their work from is self evident.
Sorry Steve__S, we’re on the same page I think. That comment you quoted was intended for the author of the original article, not at you. I edited my comment to make that more clear.
I’d say you are 80% incorrect. Apple licensed the basic ideas from PARC, but then spent months putting that famous Steve Jobs polish on it. That made the difference between an unworkable, clunky set of ideas into a coherent, intuitive interface.
Too many people don’t understand that the difference between a clunky product and a smooth product is often the difference in commercial and design success.