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Bill Gates 'not bothered' by Steve Jobs' comments

Jobs' biography didn't pull its punches, but Bill Gates isn't bothered. He even praised Jobs as doing a fantastic job.

Joe Svetlik Reporter
Joe has been writing about consumer tech for nearly seven years now, but his liking for all things shiny goes back to the Gameboy he received aged eight (and that he still plays on at family gatherings, much to the annoyance of his parents). His pride and joy is an Infocus projector, whose 80-inch picture elevates movie nights to a whole new level.
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Joe Svetlik
2 min read

Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs isn't short on fascinating insights into Jobs' life, or choice words for some of his competitors, chief among them Bill Gates.

Jobs said of Gates that he was unimaginative, that he'd never invented anything, that he'd shamelessly ripped off other people's ideas. So how does Gates feel about that? "None of that bothers me at all," he told ABC News, as seen by CNET News. "Steve Jobs did a fantastic job."

In response Gates said, "Steve and I worked together. Creating the Mac we had more people on it, did the key software for it. So through the course of the 30 years we worked together he said a lot of nice things about me, and he said a lot of tough things."

He went on to say Microsoft's pricing strategy caused Jobs to be "beleaguered," and believe "he was the good guy, we were the bad guy. It's very understandable.

"I respect Steve, we got to work together, we spurred each other on, even as competitors. So none of that bothers me at all."

Gates previously said Jobs was "weirdly flawed as a human being." Jobs also said Gates would be "a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."

Other revelations from Jobs' biography include how Jobs got away without having a number plate on his car, that he wanted to wage "thermonuclear war" on Android, he thought the outrage over the iPhone 4's antenna problem was a Google smear, and that the iPhone 5 was his last project.