Dn the aisles of the global consumer electronics show (CES), which is held from January 9 to 12 in Las Vegas (Nevada), Chinese, Japanese, European and American manufacturers compete on the merits of their new electronic gadgets. However, like twenty years ago, two ghosts float above this gigantic trade fair, that of Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, for a long time the absolute star of this meeting, and that of Steve Jobs, whose Apple company always made a point of never participating in this flashy event.
The first left his company in 2008 to take care of his philanthropic foundation and the second died in 2011. Both born in 1955, they invented today’s computing and alternately dominated the immense technology market some information. Their companies have continued this rivalry until today. With ultimately the same ingredients. The tenacity and mathematical genius of Gates on the one hand, the creativity and sense of innovation of Jobs on the other.
On Thursday, January 11, Microsoft’s market valuation briefly surpassed that of Apple, the most expensive company in the world at nearly $2,900 billion (around €2,640 billion). On the verge of bankruptcy for much of the 1990s, Apple overtook its rival in 2010, driven by the incredible success of the iPhone. At the same time, Microsoft was unable to move towards smartphones, even though it was attacked by the competition authorities over its monopoly around the Windows system.
Artificial intelligence available to everyone
Largely left behind, Microsoft has returned to the race since the arrival in 2014 of its new boss, Satya Nadella. True to Bill Gates’ approach, he did not seek the revolutionary product of tomorrow, but the next pocket of growth in which his company’s industrial approach could gain the advantage, not only over Apple but also over Google . He invested heavily in the cloud computing, decentralized computing. A winning bet, this concentration of computing power easily accessible via the Internet has become the basis of new computing. The icing on the cake is that in 2022 he joined OpenAI, the company that made artificial intelligence available to everyone.
Today, on the stands at CES in Las Vegas, we hardly talk about smartphones, which are almost out of fashion and whose sales are stagnating, but everywhere about artificial intelligence, and therefore about Microsoft. Apple hasn’t lost its crown yet, but the spotlight is shifting. History does not repeat itself, but cultures die hard.