A new authorised biography of Steve Jobs is set to land soon, delivering many different revelations about the recently deceased technology CEO. It turns out one of the biggest ones is that the leader of the fruity firm planned to “destroy” Google’s Android platform, threatening to spend all of his company’s money and his last few breaths to do so.The quote that many sites are looking at the most is this one:
I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.
He apparently believed that the Google mobile OS was too similar to Apple’s own iOS to be nothing but outright theft. This is quite a change of pace from just a few years ago, when CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, sat on the board of directors at Apple. Perhaps that’s what angered Jobs’, that he felt Schmidt used his influence in Apple to help create the Google operating system.
Since its unveiling, Android has become one of the world’s most dominant OS, quickly eclypsing Apple’s own iOS by making itself available on many different handsets, whereas the Apple one was only available on iPhones.
Apple has recently been a big part of the smartphone lawsuit scene, attacking Morolora and Samsung in efforts to make the sales of their smartphone handset quite uncontested. However Samsung is hitting back, trying to block the iPhone 4s from being sold in the US.
While it seems that perhaps Apple was gearing up to take down all opponents, especially if their recently deceased CEO was firmly behind the iniative, we lucked out as consumers that he failed in his task as nobody wants a monopoly. As Richard Stalman said, it’s never nice when anyone dies, but perhaps it was best for the industry that Jobs’ doesn’t have so much input as he once did. His legacy lives on somewhat, but perhaps Apple will now be able to move away from closed, monopolised systems.
Time will tell.