Bill Gates on Steve Jobs: We were not at war

“We had periods, like the early Macintosh, when we had more people working on it than they did. And then we were competitors. The personal computers I worked on had a vastly higher [market] share than Apple until really the last five or six years, where Steve’s very good work on the Mac and on iPhones and iPads did extremely well.

He spent a lot of his time competing with me. There are lots of times when Steve said [critical] things about me. If you took the more harsh examples, you could get quite a litany. I got a fair bit of time with him in his last year. We spent literally hours reminiscing and talking about the future. I told Steve about how he should feel great about what he had done and the company he had built. I wrote about his kids, whom I had got to know.

There was no peace to make. We were not at war. We made great products, and competition was always a positive thing. There was no [cause for] forgiveness.”

Bill Gates on Steve Jobs in The Telegraph