At the beginning of the night a video from previous common appearances played containing the unforgettable Macintosh Software Dating Game back in 1983.

The two men and the hosts, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, appeared on stage and were asked several questions about the common past they shared back at the late seventies and early eighties at the first steps of both Apple and Microsoft.

At some point the host, Walt Mossberg, asks Bill Gates on which products Apple is on Microsoft's screen radar:

Walt: I mean, let me just ask you, Bill. Obviously, Microsoft is a much larger company, you’re in many more markets, many more types of products than Apple is. You know, when you were running the company or when Steve Ballmer is running the company, you think obviously about Google, you think about, I don’t know, Linux in the enterprise, you think about Sony in the game area. How often is Apple on your radar screen at Microsoft in a business sense?

Bill: Well, they’re on the radar screen as an opportunity. In a few cases like the Zune, if you go over to that group, they think of Apple as a competitor. They love the fact that Apple’s created a gigantic market and they’re going to try and come in and contribute something to that.

Steve: And we love them because they’re all customers.

Maybe thats the reason for the iPod amnesty bin in the Zune building .

The conversation goes on talking about Xbox and a paradox. Walt says he learned from J. Allard (Xbox team leader in the past, now in Zune) that Microsoft ordered many Macs for application development, because both had the same CPU architecture, while Apple was switching to Intel technology!

Jobs answered the same question about MS in Apple's radar screen:

Steve: You know, what’s really interesting is–and we talked about this earlier today–if you look at the reason that the iPod exists and the Apple’s in that marketplace, it’s because these really great Japanese consumer electronics companies who kind of own the portable music market, invented it and owned it, couldn’t do the appropriate software, couldn’t conceive of and implement the appropriate software. Because an iPod’s really just software. It’s software in the iPod itself, it’s software on the PC or the Mac, and it’s software in the cloud for the store. And it’s in a beautiful box, but it’s software. If you look at what a Mac is, it’s OS X, right? It’s in a beautiful box, but it’s OS X. And if you look at what an iPhone will hopefully be, it’s software.

And so the big secret about Apple, of course–not-so-big secret maybe–is that Apple views itself as a software company and there aren’t very many software companies left, and Microsoft is a software company. And so, you know, we look at what they do and we think some of it’s really great, and we think a little bit of it’s competitive and most of it’s not. You know, we don’t have a belief that the Mac is going to take over 80% of the PC market. You know, we’re really happy when our market share goes up a point and we love that and we work real hard at it, but Apple’s fundamentally a software company and there’s not a lot of us left and Microsoft’s one of them.

Bill Gates talks a bit more on the issue saying that there are markets like the phone market which are suitable for software licensing to multiple vendors and others like the gaming and music players where the top-down approaches of Xbox, Zune, Surface and the Round Table are preferred.

Steve Jobs of course has to say that Apple believes this not true in the phone market, sometime it could happen but now its not clear. So Apple prefers the top-down way, building the iPhone. 

It was a very interesting interview. I believe you should watch it on video if you haven't done that already. Videos 2 & 3 are the parts talking most about iPod and Zune.

• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Prologue
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 1
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 2
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 3
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 4
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 5
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 6
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 7
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Highlight Reel
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Session Transcript