Excerpts From Steve Jobs’ Biography: “Let’s Show Him What A Tablet Can Really Be”

If you love your iPad then in addition to Steve Jobs and Apple, we also have to thank one loud mouthed Microsoft employee who bugged Steve Jobs so much "about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers" that he decided that Apple should create a device to show them what a tablet really can be and rest of it as we know is history.



This was revealed in an excerpt from Steve Jobs biography posted by The Daily Mail.

[Bill] Gates was annoyed that the guy kept revealing information about the tablet PC he had developed for Microsoft. “He’s our employee and he’s revealing out intellectual property,” Gates recounted. Jobs was also annoyed, and it had the consequence that Gates feared. As Jobs recalled:

This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as your have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, “Fuck it, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.”

Jobs went into the office the next day, gathered his team, and said, “I want to make a tablet, and it can’t have a keyboard or a stylus.”

Interestingly, we are still to see the tablet PC software that the Microsoft employee was raving about, while Apple has already sold around 40 million iPads since it was launched last year and made it to Time's elite best 50 inventions of 2010 list. The look on his face when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad would have been priceless.