What If Steve Jobs Were CEO of Microsoft?

Though computers existed before Jobs came along, they required commands to be typed in by the user and a great deal of user knowledge to be able to operate one.
Despite this, Jobs, partnered with Steve Wozniak, began making and selling personal computers, and thus Apple Computers was born in 1976.
So the first point in our comparison, if Jobs had been CEO of Microsoft, then Apple would never have existed.
Computing would never have taken off if it had remained such a technically challenging field.
A visit to Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, in 1979 showed Jobs an innovation that would change all of that-the graphical user interface (GUI).

Xerox was running a GUI that it's own programmers had designed, but they were interested only in the photocopier business and not computing, so when Jobs requested an official demonstration of the system for his entire programming team, it was granted.

At this time Microsoft was still developing the BASIC interpreter, and had Jobs been CEO, he may have missed out on this pivotal demonstration and left us all in the dark ages of command line interfacing. It then became Jobs mission to produce a GUI for the Macintosh computer, and the Apple Lisa was the result. This became the inspiration for the Windows GUI front end system-the operating system that would begin to make computing accessible for the masses. In 1985 Jobs was fired from Apple and sold all but one of his shares there. In the two years that followed he first formed the computing company NeXT computers. The internet already existed at this point, but the World Wide Web-the system of linked documents that makes navigation easy and user friendly-did not. It was on a NeXT computer, that Sir Tim Berners Lee (at Cern)-designed the World Wide Web. A year later, Jobs bought The Graphics Group-sold by George Lucas for a very good price, in an attempt to ease his divorce settlement woes. Half of the $10 million that Jobs paid for it was given back to the company as capital (all part of Lucas' aims to reduce his capital), and the company soon changed it's name, becoming Pixar and contracting with Disney to produce such modern animated classics as Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo and Cars.
The common theme here?! With Steve Jobs as CEO of Microsoft, and presumably not being fired at that particular point in his life, there would have been no Pixar, and none of those movies would have come about. Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 when Apple bought out NeXT computers. This was to be a turning point for Apple.

Sales had been stagnating, but the introduction of features and technology designed for the NeXT platform revamped the Mac.
New brands where introduced, such as the iMac and eventually the Macbook, that began to re-popularise the brand with computer users.
That strong branding proved to be invaluable when more recently devices such as the iPod music player were developed, and of course the controversial iPhone by Apple, none of which would exist in current form if Jobs ran Microsoft instead.
The start of the Windows operating system was somewhat shadier.

Bill Gates very first success, a BASIC interpreter for the Altair platform became rapidly popular with the computing community and a preproduction leaked copy was pirated and distributed.

Gates at this point became very vocal in making demands for payment, and stating that all software developers deserve payment.
If Jobs had been CEO, then perhaps open source software would be more popular today, especially when you remember that the Mac OS was based around unix and that he had a very positive attitude towards open source at around that time. Down the line, the innovative technology that Microsoft has touted has generally been 'inspired' by Apple Computers, or by the Mac to the point that Apple sued Microsoft for copyright breach in 1988, stating that they stole the look and feel of the Macintosh.

Apple lost after a drawn out court battle despite precedent being in their favor.

In 1995 the hype for Windows 95, Bill Gates stated that their product will make computers easier to use and prettier to look at.
And yet most of the features that they worked so hard for seven years on already existed-the GUI was already running on Xerox machines in 1979, some 14 years before.
But Microsoft did contribute many useful innovations to the computing world-if nothing else the large number of user applications that windows machines have always had.
These would not run on the Mac, and so to succeed, Apple was forced to follow suit, designing their own applications.
The competition between the two has clearly driven innovations on both sides.

Ultimately if Steve Jobs were CEO of Microsoft then a company that is of great importance to us today would not exist, and there would be no rivalry to drive that competition.

But, on the plus side.

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Windows operating system, developed under Steve Jobs direction may have been the most stable and useable operating system in the history of computing.
Apple has been consistently five to ten years ahead of Microsoft in its innovations and features offered on its computers, as well as in its ease of use.

We may have been left with an operating system that was very easy on memory and processor usage, instead of having to build ever bigger and more powerful machines to support the bloated, resource hogging operated systems that Microsoft produce, and the computer age may have been driven forward a decade earlier.

What's more he just might be the wealthiest man alive.