Steve Jobs' final say about Microsoft and Gates, So true and so right !!

At different times in the past, there were companies that exemplified Silicon Valley. It was Hewlett-
Packard for a long time. Then, in the semiconductor era, it was Fairchild and Intel. I think that it was
Apple for a while, and then that faded. And then today, I think it’s Apple and Google—and a little more
so Apple. I think Apple has stood the test of time. It’s been around for a while, but it’s still at the cutting
edge of what’s going on.
It’s easy to throw stones at Microsoft. They’ve clearly fallen from their dominance. They’ve become
mostly irrelevant. And yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was. They were very good at the
business side of things. They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes
to portray himself as a man of the product, but he’s really not. He’s a businessperson. Winning business
was more important than making great products. He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if that was
his goal, then he achieved it. But it’s never been my goal, and I wonder, in the end, if it was his goal. I
admire him for the company he built—it’s impressive—and I enjoyed working with him. He’s bright
and actually has a good sense of humor. But Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its
DNA. Even when they saw the Mac, they couldn’t copy it well. They totally didn’t get it.
I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company
does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of
the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the
ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople
end up running the company. John Akers at IBM was a smart, eloquent, fantastic salesperson, but he
didn’t know anything about product. The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales guys run the
company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple
when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft.
Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I don’t think anything will change at Microsoft as long as
Ballmer is running it.