“Last week Apple made headlines twice. On Monday it broke the world record for shareholder value. Apple’s $623.5 billion market cap beat Microsoft’s record from tech’s notorious bubble era,” Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes, writes for The Wall Street Journal. “Then on Friday, Apple won a $1.05 billion patent-infringement judgment against Samsung, the Korean electronics giant and the maker of the Galaxy line of smartphones that stirred Apple’s ire.”
“Why did Apple sue Samsung, the Galaxy hardware manufacturer, and not Google, maker of the phone’s Android software?” Karlgaard writes. “Apple sees Google as its chief competitor — this is no secret. Steve Jobs so hated Google’s Android that, even as he struggled with cancer, he told biographer Walter Isaacson: ‘Google… ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off. 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. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product… I’m willing to go thermonuclear on this.'”
Karlgaard writes, “It is revealing that Jobs spent precious energy in such an outburst. As a longtime Silicon Valley observer, I believe the real story is not what it seems. The source of Jobsian rage was not his Google loathing, per se. It was fear that Apple might be ‘Microsofted’ again… He feared that Google was going to pull a Microsoft and once again reduce Apple’s products to a pricey niche. To Jobs, Android looked like the new Windows.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: In the full article, Karlgaard reaches the wrong conclusion [Apple “copied” Xerox PARC, so it was okay for Microsoft to knockoff the Mac and okay for Samsung to do the same with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad] because he does not seem to understand the real history of personal computing, specifically the Apple – Xerox PARC deal and the poorly-written contract signed by an unprepared sugar water salesbozo that led to Microsoft knocking off the Mac ad infinitum.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Macaddicted” for the heads up.]