... AKA Snowboard sent this to me the other day after a phone conversation.
We are up against strict NDA's -- the company simply can't talk about what they're doing right now.
So I'm waiting. This is interesting.
Thanks!
"It's
kind of amazing that one loose-lipped (Microsoft) engineer opened his
mouth too many times pushing Jobs to license their software. The guy's
conceit
drove Apple's CEO mad enough to set him on a course that would go on to
sink Microsoft's hope for a winning mobile platform for more than a
decade."
Patently Apple
To learn a
little more behind the scenes about how the iPad came to be, you could
check out Walter Isaacson's biography titled 'Steve Jobs' at a library
if you don't own it. I'll recount just one tiny fragment from the book
about the birth of the decision to create the iPad. On Page 467 the book recounts:
"One of the
engineers developing a tablet PC at Microsoft was married to a friend of
Laurene [the wife of Steve Jobs] and Steve Jobs, and for his fiftieth
birthday he wanted to have a dinner party that included them along with
Bill and Melinda Gates. Jobs went, a bit reluctantly. 'Steve was
actually quite friendly to me at the dinner,' Gates recalls, but he
'wasn't particularly friendly' to the birthday guy.
Gates was
annoyed that the guy kept revealing information about the tablet PC he
had developed at Microsoft. 'He's our employee and he's revealing our
intellectual property,' Gates recounted. Jobs was also annoyed, and it
had just the consequence that Gates feared.
As Jobs
recalled: 'The guy badgered me about how Microsoft was to to completely
change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook
computers, and Apple out to license his Microsoft software. But he was
doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a
stylus, your dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me
about it and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, 'Fuck this, let's show him what a tablet can really be.'
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