“The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.… [Then] the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when [John] Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft. Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I don’t think anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer is running it.”

-- Steve Jobs on Steve Ballmer, who announced his resignation today from Microsoft.

“They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he’s really not. He’s a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making great products. Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA.”

-- Steve Jobs on Bill Gates.

So maybe I was right about the Gore Vidal stuff.

Both quotes come from Walter Isaacson's bio, “Steve Jobs,” but I read them in Kurt Eichenwald's excellent 2012 Vanity Fair article, “Microsoft's Lost Decade.”

Tags: Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs