Bill Gates and Steve Jobs talk about the tech world, what the future holds—and their rivalry.

In a rare joint meeting Wednesday, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and Apple CEO Steve Jobs sat down together for an interview at the fifth annual All Things Digital Conference on May 30, 2007.

Here is some extract from the interview….

Steve: Well, you know, Bill built the first software company in the industry and I think he built the first software company before anybody really in our industry knew what a software company was, except for these guys. And that was huge. That was really huge. And the business model that they ended up pursuing turned out to be the one that worked really well, you know, for the industry. I think the biggest thing was, Bill was really focused on software before almost anybody else had a clue that it was really the software.

Bill: Well, first, I want to clarify: I’m not Fake Steve Jobs.

What Steve’s done is quite phenomenal, and if you look back to 1977, that Apple II computer, the idea that it would be a mass-market machine, you know, the bet that was made there by Apple uniquely–there were other people with products, but the idea that this could be an incredible empowering phenomenon, Apple pursued that dream.

Then one of the most fun things we did was the Macintosh and that was so risky. People may not remember that Apple really bet the company. Lisa hadn’t done that well, and some people were saying that general approach wasn’t good, but the team that Steve built even within the company to pursue that, even some days it felt a little ahead of its time–I don’t know if you remember that Twiggy disk drive and…

To read full interview text here

and if you want to see the interview check out here