1993, Connie Chung interviewed Gates for her Eye to Eye thing, said one of his competitors described competing with Gates as being in a knife fight and he freaked out. Stormed off set, chucked a chair, screamed at her.
Of course he’s the face of MS, because he was the face of MS for a quarter century. “Time to make the donuts” was the tag for Dunkin for almost a decade after the Mr Whipple guy retired.
But again, why would he get annoyed. Even when Apple is doing great they’ve got 1/5 the market of MS. All he’s got to do is look at the bank account, Jobs might be congratulating himself every new commercial, and certainly the Mac cultist get a rather perverse pleasure from them, but in the REAL battle MS keeps winning.
Microsoft still has the majority of the desktop OS and MS Office, which are their two cash cows. Apple, though, has the part of the PC market it wants, which is the high end. In other areas, Microsoft's record is not good. In 2004, Microsoft launched the MSN music store to compete with iTunes. After a few years, they pulled the plug, and also left their "partners" high and dry by killing "plays for sure." Then they started the Zune project. Now they're starting MS Stores and are planning an App store for the Zune. They've tried several search engine challenges to Google without success, and the Android system seems to be making a better inroad into the smart phone market as a challenger to Apple than Windows Mobile.
Finally, over the last five years, Apple's stock has gone from $25 to $190, while Microsoft's has gone from $28 to $28. Microsoft is still larger, but not by as much as many think. Their last quarter sales were 13 billion, compared to 8.6 billion for Apple.