Steve Jobs was a genius in this area

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Time usually gives way to perspective and appreciation.

That’s where I found Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates to be in a recent chat about his onetime rival, the late Apple (AAPL) co-founder Steve Jobs.

“Steve was very different than I was, I mean, in terms of intuitive sense of a good user interface, and how you do design. He had that and I didn’t — I envy how genius he was at that,” Gates told me on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid podcast (video above; listen in below).

“But he was not an engineer. He would not know what source code was. He didn’t really know about chip design, although his ability to pick people who worked in those areas was amazingly good.”

Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was ousted in 1985 by its board and CEO John Sculley, and returned in heroic fashion to revitalize the company in 1997.

That’s when a tighter bond between Jobs, the obsessive designer, and Gates, the obsessive engineer, was formed.

Jobs was onstage at the MacWorld event, decked out in a black vest and dark jeans, when he announced a new partnership with Microsoft that came along with a $150 million investment.

Microsoft promised to develop its Office apps for the Macintosh computer for at least five years. They also agreed to make Microsoft’s Internet Explorer the default web browser for the Mac.

Gates says Jobs learned a good bit about engineering from him and his Microsoft teams.

Watch: What this former Apple board member learned from Steve Jobs

“Steve would say something like, okay, I don’t want any software to have manuals, which, okay, that’s a nice thing to say. But actually we still did need to have help and some documentation. So we got kind of the best of both worlds where he would push, and I had engineering teams that we really had to do the work,” Gates said.

Jobs died in October 2011 of cancer, but he left a lasting impression on the world through game-changing products like the iPhone, iPad, and App store.

Today, Apple is valued at $3.44 trillion, according to Yahoo Finance data. Microsoft’s market cap stands at $3.04 trillion.

With Microsoft turning 50 this year and a newly released book about his life called “Source Code: My Beginning,” it’s no surprise that many want to take a deeper look at what makes Bill Gates tick.

In the book, Gates chronicles his upper-middle-class childhood in Seattle up to the very start of Microsoft in 1975 alongside friend and co-founder Paul Allen. The book has a few stories that would come as a surprise to Microsoft investors, besides the tale of Gates first meeting a brash Jobs at a conference in the late 70s.

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