# Apple vs. Microsoft: The Cultural Clash of Art and Technology

**Podcast:** a16z Podcast
**Published:** 2026-04-10

## Transcript

i think that steve created a culture of artists and they thought of themselves that way and in many ways microsoft was a culture of technologists solving technology problems and it led to very very different products but also very very different scale at least until the iphone came out people will say that the surface hardware was the only time apple really paid attention to something microsoft did and that they really actually thought we had done a good job on the surface hardware which was quite the high praise at the time windows is really caught in this conundrum of the value that corporations and enterprises see in windows is compatibility and the levels of compatibility that windows has are legendary it was just sort of speculating what would apple be like if steve jobs were still running it in two thousand seven bill gates sat on stage with steve jobs at the all things d conference asked what he saw as the biggest difference between their company companies gates looked at jobs and said i wish we had your taste it was a rare concession from the most dominant technology company on earth a decade earlier apple had nearly gone bankrupt microsoft held the pc market so completely that apple's share had fallen below three percent fifty years after its founding apple has not only survived but reshaped entire categories of computing from phones to watches to a six hundred dollar laptop the pc industry cannot match the question is how and whether taste alone explains it stepven snofsky board partner at aixteen z and former president of the windows division at microsoft speaks to aixteenz research partner theo jaffe we have a very special guest we have stepven snofsky who is a legendary software warrior in the industry according to his linkedin he's aard partner at a sixte z he wrote hardcore software inside the rise and fall of the pc revolution all about his time at micicrosoft where he was at for forever starting as a project lead in the eighties and nineties and working his way up to the president of the windows division and he worked there at the same time as my dad so i've heard many stories about i've heard many stories about microsoft from that era in my house so stepen i mean your dad dressed as clippy at one point so i think that's that's quite the claim to fame he's dressed up as clippy i don't even have a picture of that that would be so funny i'll have to ask him about that later so we're here because this week april twenty twenty six is the fiftieth anniversary of apple linked on your position in the industry over all these years what do you think are the most important like most salient cultural differences between apple and microsoft well between apple and microsoft you know there's a very famous moment late in both bill gates career and steve jobs career where they were being interviewed on stage at a conference together and it was the first time they'd ever been interviewed on stage which is kind of a bookend to one of the very earliest times they were together was on an apple pr event that was called the pc dating game and there was bill and steve and a bunch of other original ogpc people and they were asked all these trivia questions about the industry and that was i think like in one thousand nine hundred eighty two or eighty one unbelievable and then you fast forward i don't remember the year i think it was about two thousand and five or so that they interviewed together and it was a super touching two and seven super touching interview by walt mossurg then of the wall street journal and the all things d conference iic it was iconic and the photos by aamata a silicon valley photographer are also iconic and one of the things that that question was actually asked about to each of them about what they saw as the differences and bill bill looked at steve and just said you know i i wish we had your taste and i thought that was i mean it was an amazing moment like everybody in the audience sort of froze and only maybe two hundred three hundred people in the audience but that probably is the biggest difference between the companies and you know steve made this famous saying back when they were building the macintosh real artists ship which is sort of a play on a famous picasso thing about real artist steele and it was actually in the movie the pirates of silicon valley and there a famous there was a pirate flag atop the apple building where macintosh was originally conceived and i think that steve created a culture of artists and they thought of themselves that way and in many ways microsoft was a culture of technologists solving technology problems and it led to very very different products but also very very different scale at least until the iphone came out and i think those two things about being artists and about the taste involved in making products are really what separated the companies of course they were organized differently they hardware versus software are very different timelines i would say the thing as an engineer that i constantly amazed i even talked to him about this to scott forstall who was was at apple at next with steve and then the original developer on the iphone operating system when scott was working on macos and porting it from next to the mac they went on a tear from two thousand until still today where macos was updated every single year without fail and sometimes it was great other times it wasn't great but the fact that they released a new product every single year from the time it was os version x or osx as some people microsoft never pulled that off in fact microsoft has had only two releases of windows that you could even call shipped on time three of them out of all of them from nineteen eighty three the first one was announced in nineteen eighty three and shipped two years late in nineteen eighty five and it was horrible and then everyone after that was late and it was always this waiting for godot kind of thing and apple starting in nineteen ninety nine like clockwork shipped every year and scott was the champion of that and he really we talked about it and we talked about how nobody in the world understands how difficult that is that two of us talking about it because i was working on windows and it was really that incredible accomplishment which considering they were artists was itself kind of an amazing thing because you would think the artist people are the ones who can't ever figure out how to ship nothing's ever perfect but it wasn't like that at all so do you think this distinction still captures it twenty years after this gates jobs interview is apple still artists andactly people absolutely and i think it's probably one of the things that surprised people the most about the expectations they had for how tim cook would run apple and how things ended up i mean i'm on this gatorade video right now and you know it is relatively art and you know there's obviously a huge discussion going on on x right now about you know can there really be a pc that's six hundred dollars which is super weird because that's literally a conversation we had you know twelve or whatever years ago building windows eight and it's just it's a fascinating thing people thought the company would become much more mechanical much less focused on the supply chain and things but it really kept you know you look at the iphone x you look at the neo you look at vision pro you look at airpods you look at the watch i mean these are really just stunning stunning products yeah i agree that's why i use them and i'm curious actually like what is your personal tech stack like do you just like daily drive apple everything i actually you know it's very interesting yes i do and and it bugs me for the first few years i really used only surface which is a thing that i worked on and helped release which was a whole story into itself but what really happened is of course you're in a community in silicon valley and most of my energy was working with founders and so a lot of stuff shows up on the mac first and people share things that are sort of mac native and things so for a long time i was still using microsoft office on the mac another product i worked on for a very long time but now windows is definitely in another world and i have one machine that i keep running windows that i do windows specific things on but by and large i sort of joined the rest of the bleeding edge of our industry on mac and the share numbers in the real world really show that i lived through apple getting down in nineteen ninety seven to less than three percent share of new computers sold and then for a while if you measured share by like laptops over two thousand dollars or something like that you would see it be like like ten percent in the us and in north america and now you're looking at thirty plus percent on the global share and it's just really incredible especially if you measure consumer versus enterprise share know in the business world they have a whole bunch of different requirements and the pc is very much part of that but in the home pc like if you go to best buy and what their run rate is and they still serve a significant business community there but the share number i mean considering it was less than three percent when microsoft basically rescued apple from certain bankruptcy in nineteeninety seven right when steve came back to the company this gradual climb like first with the imac and then a series of products that followed including the ipod which threw people into the ecosystem was really really something and you could see that rise right there and then of course in two thousand and eight they had the macbook air which was really as innovative then as the neio is now in a similar way it was a thousand dollars it ran intel chips and it was just something that the pc industry couldn't deliver and it took three years for the pc industry to sort of respond and it never really did and the neo is the response to something that was happening in thousand seven two thousand eight in the pc world called netbooks which were like these four hundred dollar computers that were horrible but they sold in a lot of numbers because people really wanted a cheap computer and like the asus epc is the original down in the middle right and you they were kind of thny in fact they were like a a hail mary project a salvage product for intel where they basically made those just because they had built these phone chips that they couldn't sell to any phone maker and so they were stuck trying to figure out how to sell these chips that were supposed to be for phones they ran the intel instruction set people put windows xp which was the current version of windows on it then windows vista shipped but windows vista didn't run on those machines because they only had four gigabytes of storage and one gigabyte of ram and vista just couldn't run and so we had to do these emergency deals and projects to try to prevent people from shippingist or shipping windows xp again it was a crazy time and the neo really what happened was the ipad ended up being the response to that and the ipad today sells more units than north america laptops it's kind of a crazy success that most people in the valley don't see as the success that it is but it's actually very much like the watch which is they shipped the watch but nobody knew what it was for and then everybody discovered that it was for health and now it has its place it's the health device and yeah it does notifications and stuff but it's really about health and fitness and the thing with the ipad was at first people just wanted it to replace their computer but then they found out like oh my god it's like point of sale it's signage it's for kids in the backseat it's for airplane seats it's for reading books all these things that weren't even part of the original demo and so it made a whole new market now the original demo it's all in portrait mode and it's all about basically reading books and magazines and consumption and so there was actually a very famous keyboard that they showed that was only useful on a desk so it was like a docking station that had a keyboard attached and so it's really unbeliev i mean product and of course what's fascinating is's you know we did surface at the roughly the same time so you can see it only worked in portrait mode never seen that was like this weird dock and it was really they buy ones for ten bucks yeah oh they're all over ebay but it was sort of an objection handler because and the company just didn't believe in it and it took a long time before there was sort of a blessed you keyboard that you could really use all the time you had the squishy keys for a long time but you know it's super interesting because we were working on porting windows to the arm processor at the same time as they were working on the ipad and so it was a very interesting thing and it was you know people will say that the surface hardware was the only time apple really paid attention to something microsoft did and that they really actually thought we had done a good job on the surface hardware which was quite the high praise at the time so i daily drive apple everything i used to be like the android kid in middle school i was such an android loyalist and then over time it just became inevitable i had to have find my i had to have facetime and so i had to switch over to all apple but the one windows device that i still own is my gaming pc because you still can't really game on macs so like why not that seems like a pretty obvious market segment for apple and if they got that then i can't think of anything i wouldn't use a mac for yeah so gaming has a super interesting history at microsoft you the key technology for gaming are these graphics apis called directx and they were really the things that gave hardware access to graphics hardware on the pc and so all the games got written to these directx apis these are the tier one aaa fps those kind of games where fram rate is everything and part of those games are that the people own them really want to mod and tweak every aspect of the hardware like they want the fastest lan card they want the fastest gpu they want the most current device drivers they want all of these things the mac sort of made those pretty difficult they provide most of the drivers most macs don't have extensible graphics cards you you have to buy the desktop mac and then only certain ones work lots of those constraints and so the gamer people are sort of one and the same as like modders or tuners and so they are really into what you can do with a pc and they sort of compete not just on the games but on whose pc has the lowest network latency whose game controller can fire the fastest over wired connections and using the latest usb three drivers or whatever for and stuff and that's what sort of kept the game world rooted on windows but the problem is is that a lot of the game world then moved to consoles and of course microsoft and xbox itself based on direct x that's actually the x but really the challenge there was you couldn't do the modding and everything and then the interesting thing that really happened is the most recent which is ai compute on the device and so suddenly these companion processors like on the mac are the thing that everybody cares about now on the pc you have access to nvidia cards now the most interesting thing about that is that these direct x apis were a competitor to the nvidia graphics apis and called fuda and the whole suite of apis around nvidia and so microsoft and nvidia were kind of at loggerheads for a long time over support of each other's apis and that in a sense held microsoft back from ai on the desktop which is now sort of linux or mac centric and it's a very interesting from a developer perspective microsoft not really hosting those apis themselves is super challenging and that was one of the reasons we bet on nvidia with surface so when we built the first surface for arm was used nvidia chips and that was because the graphics were so much better than anything from intel and so the game thing is still on pcs and i don't see the macs really taking over but it's just not it's big but it's not giant and it's not growing and where apple has an advantage is the ecosystem of what they call casual gaming like all the stuff that you see people on subways and stuff playing on their phone gargantuan amounts of performance that aren't needed for those and any kids games and stuff are all apple's ecosystem is fantastic for those it's just those tier one aaa things that you don't really see yeah so going back to the macbook mo do you think windows laptops are just kind of cooked now but what will they be able to do to counteract the six hundred dollar totally great general purpose computing device that apple just came up with the challenge here is that microsoft just hasn't really made a ton of progress in the past more than a decade almost fifteen years and so that means you're really really far behind there's really two giant problems one of them is that the windows apis themselves windows is really caught in this conundrum of the value that corporations and enterprises see in windows is compatibility and the levels of compatibility that windows has are legendary i mean the only thing that comes close is our like ibm mainframes running like the three sixty instruction set which runs banks and stuff like that but the pc you could take a windows ven machine and you could run the original versions of wordarden excel from likee ninety with no problem and it's just insane and you can run every device driver all these things and the reason enterprises like that is because they always have some weird smart card reader some gadget some sensor some factory automation thing that relies on that compatibility but that compatibility also means you're vulnerable to security problems you're vulnerable to fragility and conflicts between devices and you're just broadly insecure and have really bad battery life because all those things run in kernel mode it's just a mess what apple has been doing in those year releases that i talked about earlier they've been basically saying these apis don't exist anymore and you have to use these new ones and they do that and they're on this continual renewal where they just obsolete things and that really ran against everything that was about windows and so that's one big problem so even if you have windows the apis and the apps all that compatibility just will make it a non competitive device with neo and that's what you get on windows on arm today you don't have any of the benefits it's not more secure it's not more reliable it's not faster it's not cleaner it doesn't get the battery life the power management the other side of it is the oem model and that means the model where you have multiple vendors making pcs really works against having high quality and low price and you can see that they really want to do either low quality at low price or different levels of quality at higher prices this this device it's just non competitive first eight gig on a pc is is really marginable the amd chipset you're going to get you know what is that that that machine' going to get like four hours of battery life five hours i don't know what they best buy says but that's about four or five hours of battery life plus all the viruses everything run on it so like every piece of malware in the history of malware runs nine not a chance it gets n no way i mean even the neo nine hours is pushing it and so and so that and also it has a fan and it's super loud and it's made of plastic so you drop it once and it's it's doomed all of these things are problematic and to yeah so for and it weighs a ton like what is it does that go down to the weight and the physical spec i mean because it's going yeah three and a half pounds like that's a tank and and so ound heavier than the yeah than the neo and so the pc model just it doesn't lend itself to that they have to build it because the reason is is because they're all buying the parts from the same place like the brilliance of the neo is it's not a chip that it's oh god well that's a book so it's eighty dollars cheaper that's but the neo the beauty of it of course is it's running a phone chip that's been paid for a hundred thousand times over by the sales of all the phones so there's not even any what you call nre non recurring engineering costs baked into the neo it's really just paid for it's like all it's like literally the actual physical marginal cost to produce another you know a teen chip which is almost nothing and so it's a very very tough compete all of this was obvious in two thousand and seven netb books it was obvious when we built surface i had a giant two giant blog posts one from two thousand and eleven and one that i wrote when the neo came out about it and it's really it's really interesting so also in new apple products we have the apple vision pro the infamous apple vision pro which has i actually used to have one i didn't pay for it it was a school club i was not going to spend thirty five hundred dollars on that when i was in college it was very cool but it was kind of useless and i ended up not really using it it didn't sell as much as people anticipated the chat is asking did i get motion sick and no i didn't luckily i also had to wear contacts because it didn't work with bosses so what's going on with this is this well thiss a big failure is salvageable this is what i saw someone on next say something that i really hate to agree with because it's such a kind of a weird creepy kind of discussion but it was just sort of speculating what would apple be like if steve jobs were still running it and one of the things that was on the bullet list was that they would have been crushing it with ar glasses as opposed to vr goggles and i have to say the one thing i would say about avp is it has this feel of like it was a huge risk to put it out there apple putting a risky product out is such a big deal but also you had to sort of go maybe they were just they didn't quite know where it was going and they just didn't need to take the risk and if they would have waited a year they would have done ar glasses and those i'm positive they could really nail and so that's i think i have them and i took them on a trip to tokyo and i walked around i wore them on the plane i watched all the movies on the plane with them i walked around the tokyo metro station made videos of speial videos of the sub they were incredible i mean the technology was and recording the videos was it was just unbelievable but there's only so many things to do like that you know and it felt it had that feel that frankly vr has always had you know a good friend of mine was the originator of vr jaron lanier way way back in the early nineteen eighties and it's always sort of been this technology searching for you know the use case that really works and of course it had a lot of uses back in the early eighties you know the air force and pilots were using it for training in the military and it was a huge deal i once did like a thing just to make some cash at school where like the mechanical engineering department was testing out like the interiors of tanks and part of it was they gave you these crazy vr goggles to pretend you were driving a tank so that they could just measure you in the seat and i was like the right height for a tank commander and i got like six dollars an hour to pretend to drive a tank that's pretty cool final question you helped oversee the development of windows seven which was not only my favorite version of windows ever but was probably my favorite design of any os ever with the whole like windows arrow vibe the skeomorphism and the glass and the transparency so like why did we ever move away from that towards the like sort of flat minimalism and are we coming back to it well you know everything with graphics goes in these cycles where you something is new a bunch of people criticize it when it's new and then then you like it and then it gets a little tired and then people criticize you when you move away from it and then people get nostalgic and you return and i think we'll see a return i mean apple certainly drove a return to some transparency some rounded corners and things like that i think that it's really important the most interesting reason going back to direct x why microsoft introduced arrow first with vista and windows seven and stuff was it was because direct x was built into the operating system so even though direct x was first released in the nineteen nineties it actually wasn't part of the windows operating system from the get go until windows vista in two thousand and six and part of making it required in windows vista allowed vista to have this transparency because that rendering engine of directx is how you could do all those things it's another thing that mac has always had high performance graphics as part of the os and so that's why media people were always using the mac because it always had that with no fuss no mus no drivers to worry about whereas on windows you always had to put and it was only with windows seven that we really finished baking it in and it always worked and then you could really rely on it but i do think so the way to always think about anything aesthetic with computing is that the tools and the capabilities of the underlying hardware end up dictating the appearance of the software so for example like a lot of people are into dark mode and part of the lore of dark mode was that the reason it became so popular was because on phones and watches and things like that it uses slightly less power when you're in this dark on light version of the screen so then all of a sudden dark mode becomes like a thing and even though it's rooted in these physical capabilities the transparency translucency rounded corners all part of the underlying rendering engine that made those possible we switch to the st sort of the primary pol is solid that was really for speed and battery life and that's what we did on windows eight and that that sort of look was to actually be more efficient well that's about all the time we have so steven slston we're super excited for are you thanks for listening to this episode of the axteen z podcast if you like this episode be sure to like comment subscribe leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family for more episodes go to youtube apple podcast and spotify follow us on x at aixteenz and subscribe to our substack at axteenz substack com thanks again for listening and i'll see you in the next episode as a reminder the content here is for informational purposes only should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any fund please note that a sixteenz and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast for more details including a link to our investments please see aixteenz dot com forward slash disclosures