Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

New Book Reveals Apple's Steve Jobs Was First Choice for Google CEO

Posted by Roblimo on from the do-no-evil-while-wearing-a-black-turtleneck dept.

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.

7 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Surprised Jobs Didn't Steal Something... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Surprised Jobs Didn't Steal Something... by Man+On+Pink+Corner · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yes, and it's true that sociopathy is more prevalent in corporate management than it is in other parts of society.

      This isn't necessarily a bad thing, for the most part, just a case of different people with different personalities finding roles in society where their traits are assets rather than liabilities. If you could wave a magic wand and remove the influence of so-called "sociopaths" from human history, we'd all find ourselves back in the caves, if not the trees.

      Likewise if everyone behaved like a stereotypical CEO, we'd have destroyed ourselves long ago. It takes all kinds.

    2. Re:Surprised Jobs Didn't Steal Something... by pushing-robot · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Or, as it really happened:

      Jobs was working for Atari.

      Atari offered Jobs $750 to create a Breakout prototype in 4 days, with a $100 bonus for every chip he eliminated from the original estimate of ~100 chips.

      Jobs told his friend Woz about the project, and offered to split the $750 if Wozniak made the prototype. Jobs never told Wozniak about the bonus.

      Wozniak produced a prototype with an incredible 50 fewer chips than the estimate. However, Atari decided not to use the prototype, since for all its efficiency it was the hardware equivalent of a mass of spaghetti code only Wozniak could understand. The final Breakout game had close to the original design estimate of 100 chips.

      Atari kept their end of the bargain though, paying Jobs $750 for the prototype and a huge $5000 bonus.

      The same year, Jobs left Atari and used the money to found his own startup, Apple Computer, along with Wozniak.

      Wozniak left Apple five years later after crashing his light plane, with an estimated net worth at the time of $45,000,000.

      So I'm sure Woz cried his way to the bank on that one.

      --
      How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
  2. Totally different corporate cultures. by TerranFury · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Thankfully jobs turned down Google by CharlyFoxtrot · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There's not a lot of things they actually did create : Android, Youtube, Picasa, Google Groups (Deja News), Blogger where all acquired and that's not even counting the ones directly built on foundations they bought from others like Google Maps, Lattitude or Google Docs. Google is hugely overrated, they can hardly keep themselves from lousing up their few original creations like Gmail by bolting on Google Buzz or the search engine by only recently allowing people to block sites from their search results.

    --
    If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
  4. Re:good thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    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...."

  5. Also different ideas of how to make money by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.