Jobs Wanted To Destroy Android 988
hype7 writes "It's clear Steve Jobs didn't pull any punches from the interviews for his forthcoming biography. In the latest release from the book, hosted over at AP, 'Isaacson wrote that Jobs was livid in January 2010 when HTC introduced an Android phone that boasted many of the popular features of the iPhone. Apple sued, and Jobs told Isaacson in an expletive-laced rant that Google's actions amounted to "grand theft." ... "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this." ... In a subsequent meeting with Schmidt at a Palo Alto, Calif., cafe, Jobs told Schmidt that he wasn't interested in settling the lawsuit, the book says. "I don't want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won't want it. I've got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that's all I want." The meeting, Isaacson wrote, resolved nothing.'"
and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
Odd coming from someone who stole the GUI and the mouse from Xerox.
How appropriate (Score:2, Insightful)
Seeing as Apple steals most of the new iOS features directly from Android
re steve (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm going to fucking kill Google. I've done it before and I will do it again.
-Steve...Jobs?
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:2, Insightful)
and the name "iPhone"
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
Odd coming from someone who stole the GUI and the mouse from Xerox.
This actually did amuse me. Apparently tapping icons on a phone screen isn't a natural progression from clicking icons on a computer screen, which as you point out Apple didn't come up with in the first place. It's something new and unique and magical that only they could have worked out, so now anybody else that does it has stolen their ideas.
Of course, he didn't specify which ideas had been stolen, but I struggle to think of anything that the iPhone does which isn't just using a Mac/Windows boiled down to a phone-sized device. I'm sure someone will point one out to me.
So Apple has come full circle with the 1984 ad. (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as he wanted to destroy Android, it sounds like Steve Jobs became the guy on the telescreen in their 1984 commercial.
(Design) Purification Directive?
Kindergarten (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not your idea. It's everybody's idea.
Standing on the shoulders of giants - where there is room for everyone - people decided to knock everybody down to the ground who dares to scale them, because they think that only they are entitled to make use of the work of earlier generations.
The opposite of a developing country, is a stagnating country. And stagnation is what we are seeing.
Re:The lawsuits are ridiculous but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because multitouch was not at that point cheap enough to manufacture.
Apple had the manufacturing power to bring it down to a certain price (and they'd honed that on the iPod Touch). But even they couldn't bring it down to the kind of price normal people would pay.
Fortunately for Apple, they don't need to bring prices down to "normal people" levels -- they have a following of wealthy aficionados who will pay premium prices.
And the consumer wins! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How do we work this (Score:5, Insightful)
To some SJ was like a god (Score:3, Insightful)
and to some he was like a devil.
In reality he was just successful. But then this is more than most slashdotters will ever be.
Come on guys, if you don't like fanbois don't turn into anti-fanbois. It's just the other side of the same coin. Quasi-religious hate and spite is in no way different than quasi-religious fanboidom. It's irrational, emotional and makes you look incredibly silly.
Such a hypocrit (Score:5, Insightful)
Pope of Apple wants to kill heretics, shock! (Score:5, Insightful)
The ONLY thing Apple has ever done is push the trend towards good graphics. They didn't invent anything, just showed that it could be done well, and that people liked it. the Mac did this, producing a mass-market GUI with reasonably consistent UI rules. the Next basically pushed the resolution and depth of the display, demonstrating the advantage of both. the iPod/iPhone showed that even small displays could use the same basic metaphors with touch.
None of these took place in a vacuum; all of them were extrapolations of work others had done. part of Job's big sell is to convince Appleheads that they were the chosen people, that they had just just a superior product, but a product in a unique category.
Of course Jobs wanted to kill Android - its existence violates the ridiculous marketing mystique he spent billions to create. It's a religious war.
It's also totally immoral. There's simply no way to defend one company saying "no, you must not create good products". And since nothing Apple created came from nowhere, there is no legal basis for claiming some kind of IP monopoly (patent, copyright, trademark, designmark).
Jobs was the Pope of the Church of Apple, and he must have been just as frustrated as Catholic popes were during the reformation.
Is that right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Android might have "ripped [them] off wholesale," but the truth is that Android delivers a great smartphone OS to everyone instead of everyone that can save enough for an iPhone with its special data/voice plan. Did they really expect OEMs to do like RIM and just sit there while Apple designs and builds awesome hardware from the same factories they use?
Plus, Apple's products are amazing until you start "thinking different." Then you run into HUGE walls. Example: In Android, I can install an application that controls battery usage by controlling all interfaces on the phone. This seems to be impossible on the iPhone, which is bad because there are days when it will use most of the battery in less than half a day and others in about two days. Another example is adding a Windows print queue on OS X, though this might have been made easier with Lion. I'm not sure.
His frustrations are thinly warranted, though I do agree that most of Google's products are either crappy or great for two months after release. It would be great if they made APIs along with their products, but I suppose that's not the Google way.
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever used Windows 95? When you install software it leaves icons on a grid on the desktop.
Re:Control Freak (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Kindergarten (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How do we work this (Score:4, Insightful)
Trouble yourself to understand why this is. If you don't have proprietary lock-in/ownership of killer app, all you have to trade on is the quality of your manufacturing work.
That is what fashion labels offer. My wife likes to buy and sell these designer purses online. Fake ones are looked on very differently, because the quality of manufacture just isn't the same.
If software companies were banking on the quality of their finished product rather than the patented features of their sloppy-ass third-rate implementation of protected intellectual property, don't you think the IT industry would have a much better reputation? As it is people find computers relentlessly buggy and difficult to use, EVEN THE DAMN IPHONE. Maybe if quality was the #1 job, instead of 'safely-protected revenue stream,' our nation's economy wouldn't be such a horrorshow, either.
After all, for the last 20 years at least, it seems that American businesses value being first (and alone) in line to capture a revenue stream, rather than being the best product on the market.
It's no wonder our economy sucks.
As someone once said... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry he's dead but I'm not sorry he's gone.
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope that he worked this conflict out and achieved some semblance of nirvana prior to his death.
Re:How do we work this (Score:5, Insightful)
overpriced Apple smart-phones, tablets and MP3 players
I think the other phone, tablet & MP3 manufacturers would disagree with this. They don't seem to be able to compete on price without a subsidy.
Re:A slightly unrelated topic... (Score:5, Insightful)
But I definitely understand his perspective that he could beat the cancer. Imagine his ego (and I really am trying not to sound insulting), but this is a man with his own distortion field who was very successful in his chosen field. I've heard similar stories about NFL players; because of the all the work and strong sense of self importance must have to be so dedicated to compete at the highest level, to a degree you think you're invincible. "That career ending injury was terrible for that other guy; but that couldn't happen to me."
A man that believed he could put a dent in the universe probably believed he could beat cancer on his own. I know if I get cancer I'm doing exactly what the doctor tells me, but that's also probably why I'm not the head of a multi-billion dollar company either.
The Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field Killed Him (Score:5, Insightful)
"I've asked [Jobs why he didn't get an operation then] and he said, "I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way," Isaacson recalls. So he waited nine months, while his wife and others urged him to do it, before getting the operation, reveals Isaacson. Asked by Kroft how such an intelligent man could make such a seemingly stupid decision, Isaacson replies, "I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking...we talked about this a lot," he tells Kroft. "He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it....I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner."
Which means that the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field ultimately claimed the life of it's creator.
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:4, Insightful)
It is precisely because of people like Steve Jobs and corporations like Apple that everyone is so scared to do anything new.
Fuck Steve, Fuck Apple, Fuck Steve, Fuck Microsoft, Fuck Darl, Fuck SCO, fuck them all.
Re:How do we work this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A slightly unrelated topic... (Score:5, Insightful)
>This cancer is not "perfectly treatable".
Except this particular cancer was relatively easily treatable with surgery.
>And Jobs seemed to have waited with surgery only until it was clear that the tumour wouldn't shrink.
How was it going to shrink exactly? The homeopathic bullshit he was engaged in wasn't going to do anything anyway. He signed his own death warrant.
>But yes, maybe he would have lived longer if he hadn't waited. Maybe not.
All facts point to yes, he would have. Oh well, that's his decision. I can't stop people from killing themselves, but we can at least use him as a cautionary tale for those who are entranced by woo medicine.
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:4, Insightful)
First off what they did was take this [hubpages.com] :
"At $16,000 for the Star workstation and an additional $50,000 to $100,000 for the complete system Xerox only sold about 25,000 units."
And turn it into first the $9,995 Lisa and then into the $2,495 mac. You think it's easy cramming $100.000 worth of technology into a $2,495 machine ? Those guys were friggin' geniuses. They may have gotten the general idea of which way computers were headed from Xerox (who by the way gave plenty of presentations to other companies before Apple and none of them recognized the value of what they saw there) and redeveloped and adapted this stuff for the puny home computers.
You can follow the whole development through a series of screenshots taken during coding here on flolklore.org [folklore.org]. To appreciate the complexity of the task think about how long it took Microsoft to catch up with Apple even after they were given Macs by Apple to develop their software on.
Second, Woz is a great guy and engineer but after the Apple 2 his time had passed. I loved the Amiga at the time who were doing sort of the same thing as Woz with clever designs based around custom chips, but that was a dead end. The company started with Woz' technical prowess but it would've died then and there without Job's intuition about where computing was going next : easy to use interfaces, nicely designed boxes and business savvy.
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:4, Insightful)
That was my first thought. I want to know if he threw anything, or was excessively sweaty at the time.
But really, calling it a "stolen product?" I never thought he believed his own bullshit.
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
I recently powered up my old GEM desktop from the atari ST. nice slow old 68000 cpu at a handful of mhz for clock. rows of icons came up. this system dates back to the early 80's.
the fact that anyone even thinks they can 'own' the concept of the rowcolumn widget is just insane in itself.
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
And Picasso stole it from T.S.Eliot.
"One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest."
Now that really does explain the difference between Apple and the "me too" competitors.
People did say Steve Jobs was an asshole (Score:5, Insightful)
But they were usually modded down quickly by Apple fanboys. Bill Gates is often evil figure in computing but it was a blessing that EVERYONE else, including Steve Jobs, screwed up completely and we our home computers became machines based on cloned hardware and even cloned software. Or what do you think Apples response would have been to either Compaq or DrDos? Oh wait we KNOW. Clone a Mac and get sued. Luckily IBM was asleep at the wheel and Compaq cloned the IBM and we all bought IBM compatibles at a fraction of the price. And because they were clones, they weren't locked down and some drunk Fin wrote an OS and the rest is history and the future.
None of this would have happened if Apple had won the race. Or if IBM had won the race. Or commodore or any of the others. Don't be fooled by the "nice" image of Apple or the "open" base of OSX. That happened because they were to small. Want to see what PC's would have looked like if Apple had produced them? Buy an iPhone. Expensive option is the only option and totally closed down.
Real history doesn't have heroes. If we are lucky it is a tale of the lesser of two evils having the upperhand. In this case it was Bill Gates. Who won't be remembered as a great man but just as not as totally evil if the people he defeated had won. It is sorta like how the world is better of for America having dominated for the last half century. Oh, not because the Americans are so nice but the world would have been a lot worse under Nazi/Japanese/British/USSR rule.
But hey, the punters who want their shinies got to believe that their guru is a hero else they might have to ask themselves why very expensive phones with a gigantic profit margin can't be produced in America or at least without near slave labor. Dennis Ritchie? Richard Stallman? Not sexy enough, to difficult with him asking troublesome questions.
So, the fanboys turn Jobs into a man he never was and put their fingers in their ears whenever someone dares to ask why he is considered such a hero.
Cue mod down by a fanboy.