When Steve Jobs took the stage this week to present one of the most important products in his company's history, he knew that the very name of the iPhone was in dispute and that U.S. communications officials had not even approved the device.
Those facts might have concerned other business leaders in his position. But Mr. Jobs didn't miss a beat.
"Thank you for coming. We are going to make some history today," he told his faithful at the Macworld conference in San Francisco. "Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone."
The 51-year-old co-founder and chief executive officer then proceeded to grab headlines around the world with details of a smart phone everyone had expected, but no one else had been able to imagine.
Less than two days earlier, Bill Gates took the stage before a similar gathering of tech aficionados to do his traditional keynote that launches the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. His mission was similar to that of Mr. Jobs: get the world excited about technology and his company's most important product.
The audience had lined up for an hour-and-a-half before jostling and pushing for a seat in the auditorium to see the richest man in the world.
Mr. Gates walked to the podium, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and tried to make a joke about being invited back to do future speeches. "I'm not sure they'll want to invite me, because I might talk a lot more about infectious diseases than great software."
He gave a flat, tired performance, even as he showed off features of the Vista operating system, a product that by his own description will be the most used piece of software on the planet.
What do these contrasting tones, from the two largest icons of the personal computer industry, signal about the companies they created and lead?
One is led by an extraordinary visionary who maintains a vice-like grip on operations. The other is led by a revered technophile who is gradually slipping out the back door.
The two visionaries have been arch rivals since their early days in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, and their markedly different characteristics are well known.
"Microsoft has a certain cult of personality. Gates is thought of as a special guru, and people sit at his feet trying to understand what he's thinking," says Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates Inc., a research firm in Wayland, Mass. "That's totally different from Steve Jobs. He's an autocrat. He's a sun king. He's very capricious, autocratic, and creative and charismatic. He's all kinds of good things, mixed with some pretty strange things. It's a totally unique formula."
The personalities of both men have been imprinted on their companies for years.
"I think of Apple as a crystal where Steve is the seed crystal, and everybody has to conform to the shape of the seed crystal to build the big crystalline function. It's just sort of little versions of Steve," Mr. Kay says.
"Microsoft, despite the fact that it is perceived from afar as being Mordor of the dark forces, is really much more collegial. It's like a seminar with a bunch of very smart people. There are a lot of people creating momentum, making decisions and running businesses."
The culture Mr. Gates created has defined Microsoft as a "fast-follower." The software giant moves to dominate a new market where others have already led the way. The examples abound, starting with Microsoft's move into web browsing behind Netscape, web search and advertising after Yahoo, live software services behind Google, and digital music after Apple and the iPod.
