“The depths of Jobs’ antipathy toward Google leaps out of Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Apple’s co-founder. The book goes on sale Monday, less than three weeks after Jobs’ long battle with pancreatic cancer culminated in his Oct. 5 death,” Michael Liedtke reports for The Associated Press. “The biography drips with Jobs’ vitriol as he discusses his belief that Google stole from Apple’s iPhone to build many of the features in Google’s Android software for rival phones.”
“It’s clear that the perceived theft represented an unforgiveable act of betrayal to Jobs, who had been a mentor to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and had welcomed Google’s CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, to be on Apple’s board,” Liedtke reports. “Jobs retaliated with a profane manifesto during a 2010 conversation with his chosen biographer. Isaacson wrote that he never saw Jobs angrier in any of their conversations, which covered a wide variety of emotional topics during a two-year period.”
“After equating Android to ‘grand theft’ of the iPhone, Jobs lobbed a series of grenades that may blow a hole in Google’s image as an innovative company on a crusade to make the world a better place,” Liedtke reports. “‘I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,’ Jobs told Isaacson. ‘I’m going to destroy Android because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death because they know they are guilty.’ Jobs then used a crude word for defecation to describe Android and other products outside of search.”
“Although there’s no indication in the book that he ever forgave Google, Jobs set aside his disdain for the company long enough to counsel Page nine months ago, according to the biography,” Liedtke reports. “After Google’s Jan. 20 announcement that Page would replace Schmidt as CEO in April, Page called Jobs for some pointers. Jobs told Isaacson that his first instinct was to reject Page with a curt expletive, but he reconsidered as he recalled his times as a young entrepreneur listening to the advice of elder Silicon Valley statesmen including Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard Co.”
Liedtke reports, “Jobs didn’t mince words when Page arrived at Jobs’ Palo Alto home.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Google’s Android in November 2007 — eleven months after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, but obviously too soon for Google to start taking iPhone ideas — can be seen here.
Look at Android today. It’s a bastardized, insecure iOS where even apps that carry the same name pale in comparison to their iOS counterparts.
Google loves to characterize Android as “open” and iOS and iPhone as “closed.” We find this a bit disingenuous and clouding the real difference between our two approaches. The first thing most of us think about when we heard the word “open” is Windows, which is available on a variety of devices. Unlike Windows, however, where most PCs have the same user interface and run the same apps, Android is very fragmented. Many Android OEMs including the two largest, HTC and Motorola, install proprietary user interfaces to differentiate themselves from the commodity Android experience. The user is left to figure it all out.”
Compare this with iPhone, where every handset works the same. Twitter client, TwitterDeck, recently launched their app for Android. They reported that they had to contend with more than a hundred different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets. The multiple hardware and software iterations presents developers with a daunting challenge. Many Android apps work only on selected Android handsets running selected Android versions. And this is for handsets that have been shipped less than 12 months ago. Compare this with iPhone, where there are two versions of the software, the current and the most recent predecessor to test against.
In addition to Google’s own app marketplace, Amazon, Verizon, and Vodafone have all announced that they are creating their own app stores for Android. So, there will be at least four app stores on Android, which customers must search among to find the app they want and developers will need to work with to distribute their apps and get paid.
This is going to be a mess for both users and developers.
Contrast this with Apple’s integrated App Store which offers users the easiest to use, largest App Store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone. Apple’s App Store has over three times as many apps as Google’s marketplace and offers developers one-stop shopping to get their apps to market easily and to get paid swiftly.
You know, even if Google were right and the real issue is ‘closed’ versus ‘open,’ it is worthwhile to remember that ‘open’ systems don’t always win. Take Microsoft’s “PlaysForSure” music strategy which used the PC model, which Android uses as well, of separating the software components from the hardware components. Even Microsoft finally abandoned this “open” strategy in favor of copying Apple’s integrated approach with their Zune player; unfortunately leaving with OEMs empty-handed in the process. Goolge flirted with this integrated approach with their Nexus One phone.
In reality, we think the ‘open’ vs. ‘closed’ argument is just a smokescreen to try and hide the real issue which is: What’s best for the customer? Fragmented versus integrated. We think Android is very, very fragmented and becoming more fragmented by the day. And, as you know, Apple strives for the integrated model so the user isn’t forced to be the systems integrator. We see tremendous value in having Apple, rather than our users, be the systems integrator.
We think this is a huge strength of our approach compared to Google’s. When selling to users who want their devices to just work, we believe integrated will trump fragmented every time. And we also think our developers can be more innovative if they can target a singular platform, rather than a hundred variants. They can put their time into innovative new features, rather than testing on hundreds of different handsets. So we are very committed to the integrated approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as ‘closed,’ and we are confident that it’ll triumph over Google’s fragmented approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as “open.” – Apple CEO Steve Jobs, October 18, 2010
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Lynn Weiler” and “Ellis D” for the heads up.]
Related article:
Steve Jobs: ‘I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product; I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this’ – October 20, 2011
