“Larry Ellison, the outspoken and brash chief executive of Oracle Corp., is always full of surprises,” Therese Poletti reports for MarketWatch. “This week, as one of the primary witnesses in Oracle’s lawsuit against Google Inc., he might even be surprising himself.”
“With Oracle alleging Google’s Android software infringes on its intellectual property, Ellison has become an unwitting avenger for his friend, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs,” Poletti reports. “Jobs, investors may remember, told author Walter Isaacson many things for his biography, Steve Jobs before he died last year. One of his more passionate diatribes was on the topic of Google, and how Android copied many features of Apple’s iPhone and its iOS software. Jobs vowed he would ‘destroy Android, calling it a ‘stolen product.'”
Poletti 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 willing to go thermonuclear war on this,’ he said, even if he had to use all of Apple’s cash in the process… The case is also turning out to be a way for Ellison to seek some revenge against Google on behalf of Jobs, unwitting as it may be. Jobs is continuing to haunt Android, in more ways than one.”
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