IP Democracy: Gates-Jobs, McCartney-Lennon: Time Heals Wounds
In some sort of Murphy’s Law of Blogging, every time I travel, which makes blogging (not to mention simple Internet access) very difficult, many, many interesting things happen. Of course the biggest interesting thing this week is the reunion of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the monster D5 Conference.
I don’t have anything to add to the mountain of press reports regarding the first time the two tech titans shared a stage since 1983. Gates and Jobs started out together in the earliest days of the personal computing revolution, collaborating on early devices and software and collegially working to change the world through technology.
The infamous rift between Gates and Jobs in 1984 sparked a bitter rivalry, which often turned intensely personal, an estrangement that lasted, apparently, until two days ago. In a sometimes jokey, sometimes mutually flattering appearance, Gates and Jobs seemed like nothing if not old friends who had gone through some grand adventures together.
John Paczkowski prepared this “best of” highlight video for the D: All Things Digital blog and also provides helpful links to other videos from the exclusive, high-powered event.
In a weird bit of what seems like synchronicity to me, on my flight home from the (unbelievably fun) Mesh conference today, I was reading the latest New Yorker magazine issue, which has a cover story on Paul McCartney, who is, in fact, 64, as he once presaged in song. Although the situations are different, McCartney and John Lennon also sparked a revolution (and indeed helped give Job’s Apple its name) and also had a bitter rift.
However, the bad blood between McCartney and Lennon lasted for Lennon’s entire lifetime, or most of his lifetime (Update: McCartney is quoted in the piece saying that he and Lennon were friends by the time Lennon was murdered in 1980). McCartney, on the other hand, seems to now miss his boyhood chum. In the New Yorker piece, McCartney waxes nostalgic for the earliest days of the Beatles and clearly holds fond memories of Lennon. Regarding the bad period preceding the Beatles’ break-up, which he had earlier blamed on Lennon and Yoko Ono, McCartney now says “It’s a long time ago and it’s water under the bridge. They were…in love. And that excuses an awful lot of things.”
Although it’s almost wrong to compare Gates’ relationship with Jobs to McCartney’s relationship with Lennon, the middle-aged billionaires did seem to have once been young kindred spirits together. It’s kind of nice to see hatchets buried between two people who have more in common with each other than they do with practically any other person in the world. Gates and Jobs got to mend their bridges together and in person, while McCartney’s only choice is to remember Lennon fondly on his own.
On a related note, I couldn’t link to the New Yorker piece because it’s not on the Internet, although other articles from the same issue are. In another bit of synchronicity, I was on a panel at Mesh with The Huffington Post’s first-rate media blogger (“Eat the Press”) Rachel Sklar, who at one point during her talk lamented the fact that the New Yorker had in essence, deep-sixed an in-depth profile of Bill Clinton by failing to publish it on the Internet, making it virtually “non-existent” to the world.
(On yet another related tangent — synchronicities abound today — Rachel has this cool item about a “Meshfight” surrounding our panel discussion. She talks about how a Toronto Globe and Mail reporter wrote a “completely oversimplified, agenda-driven, misrepresentative, grossly irresponsible and patently wrong assessment” of our talk, which also included 1938 Media’s entertaining Loren Feldman. Rachel does not mince words.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on May 31, 2007 7:03 PM to IP Democracy