When announced that we’re going to watch a movie about computer evolution, I was like “oh no! for sure this will serve as my sleeping pill for today”. But as the story goes, it is very interesting, very inspiring that makes me want to know more about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The movie Pirates of Silicon Valley is a film based on the book “Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer” by Paul Freiberger. The movie took off w/ Steve Jobs talking to a director, which happened in the middle of a commercial for Apple Computer.
The commercial ended w/ a girl running and throwing a hammer to the screen, shattering and making it explode. The movie then transitions to a flashback on the younger days of Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, as well as the younger days of Bill Gates, Paul Allen & Steve Ballmer. Both (Steve Jobs & Bill Gates) have strong personalities, evidently genius, thinking out of the box, and very competitive. Steve started Apple Office in his garage working w/ his partner Steve Wozniak, Elizabeth and Dan, creating and selling their computers.
After some time, they had an offer to present their machine on a exhibit, from where we will see physical changes of Steve Jobs, from having a mustache to a clean, good looking face and also from shirts to coat & tie attire. The facial expression of the actor who portrays Steve Jobs is really amazing, I mean in character if you would put yourself on that situation. They were amazed how people are interested on their product. It was also the first time the two famous and influential man of computer evolution meet.
Bill Gates together with Paul Allen who worked at MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) w/ Ed Roberts at that time had their own post on the exhibit as well. MITS’s product, Altair was the first microcomputer to run Microsoft Software, manufactured too by Bill Gates and his team. They were ignored by Steve Jobs who were busy accommodating people who surrounds them. That started the expansion of Apple and had made their office from garage to a corporate office. It looks easy as i summarized the story but it wasn’t. Steve Jobs ontinues to deal w/ his temper problem, he couldn’t manage his personal life resulting to unprofessional treatment to his employees & his friend Steve Wozniak (based on the movie). He even can’t accept his daughter which he named LISA from her girlfriend. With Apple’s success he also assigned John Sculley who came from Pepsi Cola as a President for Apple Inc. After such, they visited Xerox at Palo Alto Research Center wherein they had an idea after a demonstration of a new 3 button computer mouse, they improved the mouse and added it to their Apple computer.
They also introduced Graphic User Interface which they also got from Xerox Concept. With that additional feature on their computer, it made Apple expanded so fast and earned them more money. Steve Wozniak bought a plane and unfortunately had an accident, lost a bit of his memory w/c makes Steve Jobs to go on his own, w/o his partner’s wisdom in the meantime. On the other hand, Bill Gates concentrated on how people would need him. He said “You survive because you make them need what you have”, “Keep your friends close but enemies closer”.
They went to IBM office to offer them what IBM needs to compete w/ Apple, they offered DOS (Disk Operating System) which they don’t have yet. Bill Gates has a talent in convincing people, in reverse psychology and has a good approach talking or negotiating w/ people wherein I find it very opposite w/ Steve Jobs on this movie, whose temper arises whenever he couldn’t get what he wants, whenever there’s rejections along his way. Bill Gates and his team were urged to look for an Operating System after talking to IBM.
And luckily they were able to bought an Operating System from Seattle Computer for $50,000, they improved and presented it to IBM. They also started to earn money and also heard about Apple’s success w/ their additional features on the computer, which made their way to visit Apple’s office. Bill gates used his strength in negotiating w/ Steve Jobs to encourage him to work with them and he succeeded. When Steve Wozniak came back from hospital/ rest, he quitted Apple.
He found out that Steve Jobs created 2 camps, Apple II and new team Macintosh. This time her girlfriend also made an appearance to Time Magazine about their daughter and made a negative press for Steve Jobs. As Steve Jobs faces all these, Bill Gates continues to develop on his new product Windows where Steve Jobs claimed that it was copied/steal from their concept. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had a serious talk about this, w/ Steve Jobs yelling while Bill Gates calmly explained what he came up with.
Steve Jobs realized he made a mistake trusting Bill Gates whose been silently working on his software selling it to NEC Japan w/c has been part of the commercial shown at the beginning and at the end of the movie. The story is really inspiring, though there are lots of conflicting reports about the details that made this happen, but it mostly seems to be a case of Bill Gates and his company seeing the right opportunity at the right time, and then executing well on the concept. It could have been better too is the movie was able to show how Steve Jobs came back/ rises after being fired by John Sculley.
I believe his inventions are really remarkable. And although both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were pirates, with Steve stealing from Xerox and Bill from Steve, Steve Jobs created the Mac, and Gates? well, Gates and Paul Allen didn’t appear to create anything since they wrote their little piece of code for the Altair. Anyhow, “Everything happens for a reason “ and I admire these 2 men who uses their resources, their talent, had taken advantage of one and a lifetime opportunity, coped up w/ their struggles and had made a really big contribution to the computer revolution of all time.
