The Gates-versus-Jobs comparison that became a staple of technology commentary in the 2000s and early 2010s was, in retrospect, one of the most illuminating exercises in contrasting models of technological ambition available.

Both men were dominant figures of the personal computing era. Both had built companies that became among the most valuable in the world. Both were fierce, brilliant, and not particularly easy to work with. The differences in how they conceived of technology's purpose were, however, fundamental.

Gates's thinking was essentially infrastructural: he wanted computing to become universal, and he was willing to sacrifice elegance for ubiquity. Microsoft Windows was not beautiful; it was everywhere. The strategy of licensing the operating system to hardware manufacturers — giving up control of the physical product in exchange for capturing the software layer — was a masterpiece of strategic thinking that made Gates the world's richest person for years running.

Jobs's thinking was essentially experiential: he wanted the products he built to create a particular quality of encounter between human and machine, and he was willing to sacrifice market share for coherence of vision. Apple's closed ecosystem — the insistence on controlling hardware, software, and eventually services as an integrated whole — was the opposite of Gates's approach and generated a product quality that Microsoft's more fragmented model consistently struggled to match.

The smartphone era settled something of the debate by validating Jobs's model in a new domain: the iPhone's integrated design made it the most profitable consumer electronics product ever made, demonstrating that the premium market for beautifully executed integrated products was larger than Gates's model had assumed.

Both kinds of thinking are needed. Infrastructure and experience are not substitutes for each other.