The newsletter, published by the San Jose Mercury News and bylined John Paczkowski, is well-written and generally a fun, informative read.

In today's issue, Paczkowski recalls, "Speaking at The World Economic Forum in January, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said he regretted not investing more in search technology over the past few years. 'Google kicked our butts,' he said."

It's probably impolite to point out just how far Microsoft has lagged behind the technology leaders, almost since the company's earliest days, when Gates bought up a pre-existing operting system and turned it into MS-DOS.

By the time Gates had used family connections to approach IBM and seal the fortune-making deal of a lifetime, to put DOS on the IBM PC, Apple was already working on the Mac and a graphical user interface, which Microsoft later ripped off for Windows.

Microsoft has always been more interested in market share than technology leadership, and it has played fast and loose to win, to the point of stretching or even breaking the law in some cases.

I had the chance to meet Bill Gates back in the early '90s, when I was the US West Coast Correspondent for Japanese megacorp Softbank. Together with a handful of reporters, I spent a couple of hours sequestered with Gates at a barbecue on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, in the context of a press and analyst dog-and-pony show.

"Rumpled professor" is the kindest descriptor I can apply to his personal appearance; he's cleaned up very nicely since he got married.

But he hasn't changed the macho approach to business that was immediately obvious on that occasion. That evening he was going on, and on, and on, about Apple and how they were going to, yes, kick Apple's butt in the then-current litigation over Microsoft's appropriation of Apple's graphical user interface intellectual property.

Steve Ballmer talks the same way, I also learned when I met him that weekend. Based on Ballmer's recent comments about Apple iPod users being thieves, he doesn't seem to have changed his ways in the interval.

Paczkowski notes that Microsoft has invested some $100 million in its search engine technology, with the hope of catching up with and overtaking Google.

But I'm wondering if Gates's violent metaphor betrays an obsession with physically beating a competitor that, in this case at least, may have gotten in the way of actually building a better solution for customers. That, as everybody knows, is the way a company can actually win new customers and keep them loyal.

Paczkowski: "Matching wits with Google is no easy task though, and it remains to be seen whether Redmond's offering will be competitive with Google's. Certainly, the preview version of the engine is unimpressive. 'From what I've seen, the technology is still pretty unremarkable," SearchEngineWatch.com Editor Danny Sullivan told PC World. [Microsoft hasn't] been savvy in terms of search optimization.' "

But that won't stop Microsoft, I'm sure, from trying to kick some Google butt in return for the butt-kicking Gates perceives he's received.

Now I'll reveal - if you regular readers haven't figured it out already - that I'm a Mac partisan and have been ever since I first used a Mac not long after it came on the market.

The first time I met Steve Jobs was at the grand Next, Inc. launch back in 1988. His famous "reality distortion field" was vibrating at a particularly high level that day, with a huge crowd of reporters from all over the world treating him like a rock star.

I don't want to get too hung up on personal hygiene in my comparison of these two personal computer industry giants, but suffice to say that when I got up close to Jobs, it was obvious that he had recently washed his hair. And his spectacles were free of fingerprinted smudge.

But, what I really like about Jobs is that his motivation has always been to create the best possible technical solution, with cutting edge industrial design.

He invested $7 million of his own money in Next - $7 million in 1985 dollars. (Successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs say, "Never, never, never invest your own money." Of course, some of the most astonishing success stories have resulted when entrepreneurs have ignored this advice. Including, I'd argue, Jobs' investment in Next. As I've written here before, the Next system is today's multimedia, Web-ready personal computer at an affordable price point thanks to manufacturing advances in the past 16 years.)

Obviously Jobs has made compromises along the way. It is clear, however, that his ambition has never been to dominate the market and "crush" all possible competitors, with buggy software that's always at least a couple of years behind the best.

A metrosexual approach to personal computer design, in other words. Or, to use a more topical metaphor: the "blue state" of personal computers, compared to Microsoft's swaggering macho "red state."

Links:

No results found for: "Linux." Did you mean: "Windows" by John Paczkowski, Good Morning Silicon Valley, 10 November 2004

Next Computer, Wikipedia article

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