Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Apple, Inc. CEO Steve Jobs will be sharing the same stage together as both tech giants will be fielding questions at an open forum at the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital Conference.

This conference, which is in it’s 5th year will be an unscripted, informal meeting of great technology minds.

The date is set for May 30th, 2007 in San Diego, CA and will feature not only Gates and Jobs, but other great tech minds and will be hosted by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal.

This will be the first time both tech giants have appeared on the same stage since the 1997 MacWorld Keynote address where Bill Gates appeared via satellite to help Steve announce that Microsoft had not only been allowed to purchase non-voting shares in Apple, but also that Microsoft Internet Explorer would then become the default browser on all new Macs. This obviously didn’t sit well with loyal Mac fans and has quite obviously changed since then as OS X’s default browser is now Safari and Microsoft no longer owns those shares of Apple.

Since 1997 Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have gone back and forth on their relationship many times and if the past is any indication it looks like the gloves are about to come off again as Apple, Inc. has recently released an advertising campaign aimed at showing flaws in Microsoft’s new operating system Windows Vista. Gates even went on to say, “I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.”

Gates goes on to say this in response to many claims that Windows Vista copied Mac OS X, “You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, “Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along,” that’s fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.”

As you can see Bill Gates isn’t too happy with how Apple, Inc. is portraying Microsoft in their ad campaigns and so this meeting of two great tech giants will probably be like watching two heavy weight boxers go at it. I’d imagine it will start off civil and in good spirit, but will eventually turn towards each trying to prove why they are more innovative.

Microsoft and Gates may very well be worried about this meeting of the tech giants since recently Apple has increased their personal computer market share from 3.6% to over 4.7% in just the last year and although this may seem small that is over a 30% increase.

Also, the buzz around Vista’s release was pretty much a dud and quite a lot more attention has been given to Apple’s new OS called Leopard which is set to be released in April of this year.

Microsoft’s recent entry into the personal media player market with the Zune also fell on deaf ears as sales have been minimal and the growth of Apple’s ever popular iPod have grown even more and have dominated the market for the last 5 years. This growth in market share will probably become even greater in June as Apple’s much talked about iPhone will be released.

This again isn’t the first time these two old buddies have butted heads and will most certainly not be the last.

To see a very interesting documentary that was filmed during the start of Microsoft and Apple, please see this post titled The Rise of Silicon Valley. It’s a five part video series on the beginnings of both tech giants and the you can definitely see the disgust Steve Jobs has for Microsoft. He even goes as far as to say that “Microsoft has no taste” and that they “don’t think of original ideas and don’t bring much culture into their products.” Jobs then goes on to say that “Microsoft really makes third rate products.”

I for one can’t wait to see this and look forward to this heavy weight match up.