Is there anybody out there who doesn’t know who Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are? Everybody and his brother know that they are the leaders of Apple and Microsoft and have been dominating the personal computer industry for the last 30 years. In all of this time, they’ve been very careful to appear together very rarely, but last Wednesday they shared the stage at the D: All things Digital conference. They chatted about how the industry evolved during their kingdom and talked about how they think our digital future is going to be. A warm and friendly chat, like a get together for long-standing friends who finally relax and nostalgically recall the common past. But wait, look at the picture, is that a real smile?

They’ve been enemies so far, trying to extend their business by attacking the market occupied by the other company, but now they have common enemies to fight. Google is moving users one level up in the stack, feeding them with application that run inside a normal Internet browser, storing data on the server, and basically making the personal computer a commodity that nobody cares about. And they use AJAX, a technology paradigm where neither Apple nor Microsoft have experience. Hand-held manufactures are on their way to provide a new computing concept, where you carry your important data and applications in your pocket and always on. Meanwhile, the Open Source movement is making operating systems and standard applications a commodity.

They know their traditional business is in danger, so their companies are both busy at differentiating, trying to find an escape path. Microsoft spent the last years investing in game consoles (the Xbox), internet search engines, portals and advertising (MSN) and now they’re trying to merge with Yahoo and become a media company. Apple spent the last years investing in portable players (iPod), music distribution (iTunes), cell phones (iPhone) and basically dismissed the computer hardware market when they stopped having their own technological platform, standardizing on the same Intel processors that run Windows.

This get-together appears as one more signal the personal computer industry reached a dead end and a new industry is taking the lead. That is not a real smile at all. Their eyes are nervously trying to convey a message: “let’s stop our fight and work together to save the business”. I won’t be surprised if they announce a joint venture or a strategic partnership in a few months.