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What Steve Jobs from Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft were secretly thinking about each other during their appearance at the D: All Things Digital Conference.

Props to Wikipedia for the pic and ToonDoo for the comic software.

I have a books on CD snail mail subscription and it seems that there are a disproportionate amount of audio books about Apple. So from a lack of choice of computer related CD books I was listening to ‘The Apple Way: 12 Management Lessons from the World’s Most Innovative Company’ by Jeffrey Cruikshank. Here is a good review. I’ve already listened to a bunch of books about Apple so it was mostly a rehash, except for one thing. The book went into more detail about the relationship between Apple and Microsoft than I previous knew existed.

Talk about a love hate relationship. I always thought that Microsoft flat out stole the mouse-based graphical user interface from Apple. At least that’s what Apple would prefer most people think because they have always liked to turn Microsoft into a villain. In reality, Apple actually had a licensing agreement with Gates that gave them rights to create the windows style operating system! Who knew, and there is more on that history here.

The other unbelievable fact in the book is that Microsoft is actually the largest developer of software for Apple computers on the planet. That’s right - every major Microsoft product including Office programs like Excel and Word have versions created for Macintosh, imac, powerbook and the like. No wonder why, when I started up Windows Vista on my new laptop my first thought was, ‘now they finally really made it look like a mac’.

Not to mention the fact that one of the key components of Apple’s turn around was a $150 million dollar investment from Microsoft. The blog techcomp-it has more on that. It was my new understand of the complex nature between the two companies, that inpsired me to create the little cartoon above.