“One of the first details to leak out of In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives — the new page-turner about Google released Tuesday — was that when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were pressed to hire a CEO, Steve Jobs was their first choice,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune. “But Steven Levy — who had previously chronicled the creation of the Mac (Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything) and the iPod (The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness) — has lots more to say about the relationship of Apple and Google in his latest book.”
Among the highlights:
• Android’s OS becomes more iPhone-like: “It took a while for Jobs to understand that Google was becoming a competitor… By 2008, however, the trajectories of the two companies, at least with respect to phones, was less a merger than an impending collision.”
• Android: “As he learned more about how the benign competitor he had envisioned was actually a full-blown alternative to the iPhone, Jobs became increasingly upset. … From all accounts, Jobs prided himself as a canny observer, not only of business but also of human character, and he did not want to admit — especially to himself — that he had been betrayed by the two young men he had been attempting to mentor… In the summer of 2008, Jobs ventured to Mountain View to personally judge the extent of the violation. He was reportedly furious. Not only did he believe that Google had performed a bait and switch on him… but he also felt Google had stolen Apple’s intellectual property to do so.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]