Stereotyping is a lot more fun than actually trying to understand comprehensive personalities of people, especially if they are celebrities who deserve some jealousy.  So let’s do some shallow stereotyping. 🙂

I am not sure how I got around to this transcript of  NerdTV episode. I actually didn’t even know who Andy Hertzfeld was until I read the whole thing here.

Andy: Yeah. Steve came over to my house shortly after it aired in 1996. I asked him what he thought of the documentary. He said he thought it was really good, but when he watched it on TV he thought his comment about Bill Gates having no taste might have been a little too harsh. So he called Bill Gates to apologize.

I don’t know how you call Bill Gates, but if you are Steve Jobs you get right through. He said, “Bill I’m calling to apologize. I saw the documentary and I said that you had no taste. Well I shouldn’t have said that publicly. It’s true, but I shouldn’t have said it publicly.”

And Bill Gates replied, “I’m glad you called to apologize, Steve, because I thought that was really an inappropriate thing to say.”

Steve couldn’t help himself, he said, “You know it’s true, it’s true you have no taste.”

And Bill Gates responded to him, saying “Steve, I may have no

taste, but that doesn’t mean my entire company has no taste.”

So Bill admitted he had no taste, but thought it was an unfair slur to say that MICROSOFT had no taste.

It’s amusing to see the roots of alleged stereotypes for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs called to apologize and yet he continued to insist that his insult was correct. what an ass! Bill Gates sort of admitted that he had no taste but he’s more worried about his company’s image. what a soulless business man!

They also talked about Andy H. trying to sell a program to both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. He made this conclusion.

Bill Gates was being extremely analytical, trying to figure out how many lines of code, how long that would take, how many dollars per hour you should get. Whereas Steve Jobs’ approach was to just pull a number out of the air, insist it was right, and not even allow you to argue with him – just divine interpretation.

I kind of like Steve Jobs’ style of working.  Well, if you had the charisma and persuasion power to pull off crap like that, wouldn’t you? I know we all like to think we are rational and analytical and in engineering and tech fields,  that’s valued above soft skills. Especially from the engineering training MIT gave me , I am supposed to value my analytical skill as my primary strength.  But is it really that bad to be an irrational ass who makes beautiful things?