Steve Jobs is a universally acknowledged visionary. At the helm of his company he was able to change the whole industry as we know it. Apple and Microsoft are the biggest rivals in this industry but as it turns out, the men behind both these companies weren't exactly arch nemesis.
Both Apple and Microsoft go a long way back, even more so their co-founders Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. There have been instances when the Apple guru said some pretty sharp things about his counterpart at Microsoft but that was just business as usual. On a personal level, one can not say that they were each others arch nemesis, as many think they were.
Walter Isacsson, Steve Jobs' biographer writes in his book that months before Steve's death, Bill Gates came by his house and both of them talked for a long time. It wasn't business then as they had left their executive positions. It was a meeting on personal level and a very nice summary of their conversation has been included in the biography. Even the book hasn't been able to convey properly the mutual respect these gentlemen had for each other, as it turns out Steve's wife called Gates after his death and expressed this concern.
Recently Bill Gates gave an interview to the Telegraph. In that interview he revealed that days before the death of Steve Jobs he had sent him a letter. Excerpts from the interview:
I told Steve about how he should feel great about what he had done and the company he had built. I wrote about his kids, whom I had got to know…There was no peace to make. We were not at war. We made great products, and competition was always a positive thing. There was no [cause for] forgiveness.
[..]Steve was an incredible genius who contributed immensely to the field I was in. We had periods, like the early Macintosh, when we had more people working on it than they did. And then we were competitors. The personal computers I worked on had a vastly higher [market] share than Apple until really the last five or six years, where Steve’s very good work on the Mac and on iPhones and iPads did extremely well. It’s quite an achievement, and we enjoyed each [other’s work]….He spent a lot of his time competing with me. There are lots of times when Steve said [critical] things about me. If you took the more harsh examples, you could get quite a litany.
(via 9to5Mac)