Google's Larry Page Claims Steve Jobs' War on Android Was 'For Show'
In a new interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page claims that Steve Jobs' war on Android was "for show", a move that served as a rallying point for Apple and its employees.
I think the Android differences were actually for show. I had a relationship with Steve. I wouldn’t say I spent a lot of time with him over the years, but I saw him periodically. [...]
I think [the fury around Android] served their interests. For a lot of companies, it’s useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that.
Page goes on to claim that he believes companies should not be looking at their competitors and instead should simply be doing their best to improve the world.
Jobs had mentored Page and Sergey Brin in Google's early days, and Jobs reportedly requested a meeting with Page last year after Page took over as CEO. According to Page, the two discussed the business of running a company during that amicable meeting. But Jobs made clear in his authorized biography that he intended to "destroy Android", threatening to wage "thermonuclear war" in an attempt to bring down what he viewed as a stolen mobile platform.
At least publicly, Page suggests that Jobs' position was somewhat more nuanced, with the two able to maintain a relationship while Jobs' anger toward Android included a bit of posturing to keep the rapidly-growing competitor at the forefront of Apple's attention.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Top Rated Comments
If SJ were alive he would NEVER consider any kind of settlement with you thieves. Too bad Tim Cook is not as principled.