I think Steve Jobs though, moreso than Gates, drove Apple to produce the kind of products he thought the world needed. Regardless of whether Jobs was delusional

I think Steve Jobs though, moreso than Gates, drove Apple to produce the kind of products he thought the world needed. Regardless of whether Jobs was delusional on this point, I think it’s clear that he put his values ahead of the profitability of the company, and ahead of his own career at Apple. His ouster is evidence of that. He was not protecting the throne. Gates did. He was no Larry Ellison, but he was a raw competitor. He wanted Microsoft to win. And his vision of what a computer could be was limited to “whatever the best thing Microsoft could come up with is.” Jobs didn’t care what Apple the company was capable of, he was driven by an external vision of what the world needed and he shaped Apple to match that. Gates killed a lot of good companies out of sheer competitive ferocity, and we suffered because of it. Computers are less good today because Netscape and Word Perfect and Samba were mercilessly fucked with. And we’ll never know how many products were delayed by decades because of the chilling effect Gates deliberately created. I think in a real sense he owes us for that. Jobs did what he thought was best for computer users. We can debate whether he knew what was best, but I think his approach comes with less karmic debt.