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New Book Reveals Apple's Steve Jobs Was First Choice for Google CEO
A Reader notes, Steven Levy's latest book, In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives, lifts the lid on the secretive world of Google, revealing how the founders fell out with Apple's Steve Jobs and what happened in the search engine's exit from China. Levy claims that when Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were on the hunt for a chief executive they wanted Steve Jobs to take the job. Obviously, he didn't, and later the two companies became fierce rivals rather than allies.
It makes you wonder how things would have turned out if Jobs had accepted the offer. Then again, the competition between the two is likely to still lead to some new innovations that might not surface otherwise.
I wonder what would have happened though...
Actually Jobs was choice number 3, after Sergey and Larry as co-CEO.
Wired has it this month, from the same author. Oddly I don't recall a book reference.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/mf_larrypage/
In Nearly All Paradigms, Shift Happens.
If Jobs ran Google it would only find things approved by king Steve and he'd try to control the content of those. That clown is twice the megalomaniac that Gates is.
from them.
Jobs and Gates seem to display sociopathic, if not psychopathic characteristics. Is that necessary to succeed in business today?
Or perhaps it has always been true. Have any studies been done that rate the sociopathic/psychopathic levels of captains of industry?
How different would things be-
Google search would be:
just as simple
Prettier
Slower
Not work as well
Only return approved results
Google would not:
Lead the market in Search or advertising
Have created Android
even pretend to "not be evil"
Let us all give thanks that Steve Jobs did not become CEO of Google!
Linux computers, watercooled, photography
the TOTAL lack of magical amazing shit in google is explained
Here's the impression I get:
Apple is a dictatorship run by an obsessive-compulsive designer. It works its employees hard to produce well-integrated, very refined products, following one man's vision.
Google is a confederacy of teams joined by a common culture. People within the organization have considerable freedom to pursue their own agendas, and Google tries to harness this energy to make its search business more profitable, even if it means taking a scattershot approach.
Apple has OCD. Google has ADD.
Probably cherry-picked words to create a non-existent controversy - and YOU'RE PAYING. Oh and Google causes cancer. Oh wait it cures it.
. o O { don't feed the troll, don't feed the troll, don't feed the troll...}
--- Nothing To See Here ---
I'm a troll? Well maybe a little, I shouldn't have said we get nothing but you can not seriously argue we would have gotten anywhere near the amount we have from google. Apple summer of code anyone?
Wired ran an article adapted from the book, and the info about Jobs was in there. It was an interesting read.
Wired, April 2011, page 80: An Unconventional CEO by Steven Levy
If Jobs led Google: In order to search for anything, we would need little hand-held keyboardless Google devices that ran only on one proprietary Google OS, which would randomly blow up and fail to work while held in your left hand, and any search result that violated Google's decency standards (which would forbid nudity or the mention of homosexuality) would be blocked.
Innovation: one-click shopping and the two-point affine transformation.
If the pinch gesture is the "best thing" about any of Apple's products, Jobs will be answering to Zeus in the afterlife, with Eudoxus pressing the case against.
Zeus will also want to know why Jobs favoured that gaunt, black font named after a frigid hinterland rather than the voluptuous and pleasing Helenica, while in the background the inventor of the Antikythera clucks in disbelief, "All you have to show for immortality is the pinch gesture and a faim font?"
Published in 2007 already stated this...
WebKit.
s/Eudoxus/Eudoxus, who won't yield an iota,
The subconscious mind sometimes plays hard to get. It had to be a plant to be that good. Doh!
WebKit was only reopened for Apple to receive development and testing from other companies and organizations. Going over the logs it seems that Google submits more changesets than Apple does these days. WebKit was not a contribution from Apple; the move was purely motive-based.
Apple and open source reminds me of this: http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/. "We value openness as a company...."
WebKit was a derivative of KHTML, a GPL'd system.
That's all we needed was another organization with this jacktard at the top encouraging retarded elitism.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I think a week old cheeseburger could have made a more useful comment.
By definition they don't give a damn about anyone except for themselves. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociopaths_in_society
sociopaths are "antisocial personalities whose behavior is a consequence of social or familial dysfunction". (emphasis mine)
I don't believe sociopaths are the generators of scientific progress that makes everyday life better. I see them more as the tapeworms of society leeching from our collective capacity for goodwill and like a tapeworm inducing all sorts of illnesses in the collective body.
whose behavior is a consequence of social or familial dysfunction
This is a common misconception. There is something genetic going on as well.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
OK, now, that's an interesting point. You're saying that sociopathy is an objective condition that can't be diagnosed by random people on Slashdot?
Then we really are wasting our time in this thread, aren't we? It's as if the whole premise -- the suggestion that Gates and Jobs and other 'captains of industry' are clinically-diagnosable sociopaths with dysfunctional backgrounds or genes -- was just so much verbal diarrhea from the get-go.
Imagine that.
Google's idea is basically to make money on their search technology, which means on ads. To that end they develop new things that help get people using their search, and make those things free. They aren't concerned about monetizing a given product so long as that product helps drive their primary business.
Apple's idea is to make a ton of profit on all their hardware. Anything they introduce, they want high margins on. It is designed to be profitable as it is, not to try and drive other business. They tie their products together, but as a way to get you to buy more products.
It's probably a very good thing Jobs didn't get hired on at Google because I think Bing and/or Yahoo would have crushed them now. Apple's strategy is not a bad one, as is clear by the money they make, but it is not one that would work in the market Google is in.
Google doesn't make things that are visual enough. How would the job interest Jobs?
You suck at trolling, dude. Try another job...
It makes you wonder how things would have turned out if Jobs had accepted the offer.
Well, google phones probably would have been cooler and much more popular. ;-)
It was derived for the major components. But the GPL is slowly being excised from WebKit. Anything that can be licensed BSD in WebKit has already done so. I think all ObjC platform code is BSD currently.
I just scanned the latest WebKit nightly.
Files matching ".cpp .h .mm" in trunk/Source: 8726
GPL files in JavaScriptCore: 245 out of 688
GPL files in WebCore: 1705 out of 5437
GPL files in WebKit: 228 out of 1417
GPL files in WebKit2: 34 out of 937
------------------
GPL files = 2212 (2212 in directory)
BSD files in JavaScriptCore: 403 out of 688
BSD files in WebCore: 3510 out of 5437
BSD files in WebKit: 1115 out of 1417
BSD files in WebKit2: 897 out of 937
------------------
BSD files = 5925 (5940 in directory)
In two years the GPL will likely be no longer in WebKit.
Webkit. Just one example. I'm not a fan of Steve Jobs at times, and while it could be argued that Apple may not be as giving as some other companies, it doesn't mean they don't participate.
they open sourced webkit because they had to, because it was based off the gpl khtml from kde.
Google is increasingly the oracle of all human knowledge, it's too important to humanity to give it both a silly name AND a douchebag control freak sociopath the helm.
So I was reading how it all came down to a radar operator in Soviet Russia who refused to believe that the blib on his radar was an American missile and saved us from a nuclear holocaust. It's estimated something like that happend about 50 times in the cold war. Then I read about how if CFCs weren't 10% cheaper than BFCs, a 1000 times more potent ozone depleting agent, we'd have no ozone layer and a collapsing biosphere. There have been a lot of other near misses I'm sure.
So I'm reading that we've again we've been spared a very very dark future.
Psychopathy is caused genetic abnormalities or damage to the brain, sociopathy is caused by lack of socialization.
old news.
The original commenter said they didn't contribute to open source. It doesn't matter what the license is, but Webkit is one example of where they took someone's open source code, arguably improved it, and put the changes back out into the community for others to use. Thanks for proving my point.
I don't think this is really new information. I'm pretty sure the same thing was mentioned in Ken Auletta's book, "Googled". Take a look at the third link in this book search here. I'm pretty sure that's talking about the search for a CEO, and Sergey and Larry both saying "We like Steve Jobs!" as their nomination for CEO.
Maybe Levy's book shows it was more than just a passing joke by Sergey and Larry, but it's right there in Auletta's book.
WebKit was a derivative of KHTML, a GPL'd system.
Major parts of it were rewritten (such as the javascript engine). Furthermore, KHTML was LGPL, not GPL. What that means is that Apple could have fairly easily structured the project to keep their code in separate libraries from the KHTML-based code, and kept their parts closed. They did not. They made all of their work open.
It might be in the book, but it's not a "Breaking News" kind of thing. It's been known for quite some time already!
This is blinging
Jobs-run Google. It makes me nauseous just thinking about it. I can just see the great stuff Google has made, perverted by Jobs. A Google search engine that looks pretty, but just has one unlabelled button, no advanced search options (because they "clutter the interface"), and restricts what I can search for. Android? Well, hell, see IPhone. Of course some people would say that's just fine, but the power and flexibility and relative openness is what makes Google's products what they are. And, of course, there'd be rabid Google fanbois making twisted circular arguments that anything Google (Jobs in other words) does, no matter how arbitrary, evil, and non-sensical, actually makes perfect sense and is actually for your own good. Apple would probably be bankrupt, since it was on the ropes when Jobs took it back over.
Of course, in reality, Jobs would have pursued entirely different lines of research at Google, I doubt he would not have allowed it to run free as it seems to now. Some of the people that work there would have never joined under Jobs (just as how some people don't want to work for Apple, for Microsoft, or for Orcale. See the Sun brain drain under Oracle for an extreme example of this.)
I know you're just trolling and poorly at that but Apple does contribute to open http://www.opensource.apple.com/. Their contribution to open source is why you can find a alternative distributions even if the following is like open solaris sized at best.
Thank christ this didn't happen. Steve Jobs would have stifled innovation so much and we'd be paying huge for every single google service we currently enjoy at no charge.
Fuck Steve Jobs, seriously.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
His work with Apple(which obviously gooses the value of his stock holdings; but for which he doesn't get paid nearly what he easy could demand)
Yeah, about that famous "$1" salary that Jobs gets from Apple (a headliner news item he shares with other tech moguls). The purpose of drawing a low salary is to avoid paying the highest rate of 35% income tax and instead pay 15% capital gains on stock grants and qualified dividends. Steve Jobs is the 34th richest person in the U.S. and tied for 110th in the world with an estimated net worth at $5.5 billion (a respectable chunk of which comes from a 10 million stock grant from Apple in 2003 worth $3,350,600,000 today).
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