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.

Comments

Wired has it this month

[scotch51]

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/

Totally different corporate cultures.

[TerranFury]

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.

Re:Surprised Jobs Didn't Steal Something...

[pushing-robot]

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.