Slashdot Mirror
Jobs Wanted To Destroy Android
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.'"
Odd coming from someone who stole the GUI and the mouse from Xerox.
from Xerox PARC and other places. Google was simply following in Apple's grand tradition of stealing any IP that wasn't nailed down too tightly.
On one hand, yes, the features probably are largely stolen.
On the other hand, that’s kind of how technology evolves.
Locking down products and ideas to the person who originally introduced them doesn’t work patents don’t work and I don’t think a free for all would either (copying something is always cheaper than development). So what is the solution here?
Seeing as Apple steals most of the new iOS features directly from Android
Can't make a phone, AAPL thought of it first?
Like the GUI and everything else, and Disney invented Snow White. It's all bullshit.
I've never really bought into the whole Karma concept, but things like this make you wonder.
I'm going to fucking kill Google. I've done it before and I will do it again.
-Steve...Jobs?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Don't forget what Android looked like pre-iPhone
If Android had launched like that, the iPhone would've destroyed it. Yes, phones before the iPhone had capacitive touch, but no one was doing multitouch. Or at least, not on a wide scale like Apple did.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
It's my idea. Don't you dare to use MY idea. No, I don't care if somebody just came up with it. It was MY idea.
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.
Isn't the free market a bitch sometimes.
Keep repeating a myth and people believe it. Apple did not steal from Xerox. Apple was already developing a GUI back in the late '70s.
Awe....aren't you cute. Can't deal with the truth about St. Jobs? Dude - dudedette, for those of us who were around back then, in the early '80s, Jobs himself admitted to seeing PARC's GUI and basing the whole Mac GUI on that.
At the time, Xerox was your typical complacent big corporation that had a R&D arm. And as such, they're managers were too short sighted to see the potential of their GUI OR felt that it was irrelevant to their business and therefore let it slide. Jobs saw the potential and ran with it.
BUT....unlike Google, Jobs didn't borrow/steal from a product being currently marketed - it was just a prototype in PARC's lab at the time and absolutely no indication from Xerox that they'd be using it. So, St. Jobs' reputation is still intact as the wizard of technology and marketing.
The book delves into Jobs' decision to delay surgery for nine months after learning in October 2003 that he had a neuroendocrine tumor — a relatively rare type of pancreatic cancer that normally grows more slowly and is therefore more treatable. Instead, he tried a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments he found online, and even consulted a psychic.
He seems to be a poster child for alternative medicine.
Exactly how not to treat a perfectly treatable cancer.
If, the author is telling the truth. Whilst I'm not Mr Jobs' biggest fan, I do have to take this source with a huge grain of salt given it was published after his death. OTOH, it would fit with Mr Jobs' narcissism to have a scathing biography ready-written for his demise.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
Steve Jobs:
"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
"Good artists copy; great artists steal."
http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/452150-bill-gates-isnt-too-bothered-by-piracy/
Bill Gates:
"It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."
"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though," Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
Ariel Katz, a law professor at the University of Toronto and an expert on the economics of piracy:
"Microsoft benefits from piracy, then says, 'If you think prices are high, blame the Chinese, because they are the thieves,' "
"They like us to feel guilty — to think that piracy is wrong and immoral. Economically, it's not necessarily true, but it resonates with the public."
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Said the man whose OS is based in BSD.
That he was; its OK for Apple/Jobs to steal ideas from others but oohhhh boy, watch out if others tried to steal his.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Why hasn't Steve rolled away the stone?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
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.
> Nothing on Android looks or works quite right. ...in other words you're just used to how Apple decided to do things and can't cope with anything else.
"but but Android is a copy of Apple really it is. Never mind the fact that it isn't really."
Some of us like that fact (that Android isn't really a clone of PhoneOS). Makes working with our phones nicer and much less of a bother. ...as far as "programmer art" goes. Android runs much of the same programs as the iPhone does and they're written by the same people.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"Good artists borrow; great artists steal." -Steve Jobs
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.
It's not about money it's about ego. Steve heard over and over how innovative he was how great he was how much better he was then everyone else and he started to believe it. So when the competition started implementing some of the ideas he implemented he viewed it as an affront to his greatness. He saw the strength of android and feared it, he probably sees android doing to the iphone what windows did to the mac, ironically enough by using many of apples innovations. That is why he wanted to destroy android he has been down this road before and is afraid of losing his greatness.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
What was low quality of it? Don't like it, change it! You are not forced to use the stock interface on an Android phone, there are tons of custom interfaces out there.
/. community know that is a lame cop out when you can't think of anything. I'm not trying to say that everything works perfectly and Android is full of unicorns and rainbows. I am just curious if it is part of the actual Android system or if it is a 3rd party application that you downloaded to the phone.
What didn't "look or work" quite right? Once again, you can customize the way your phone looks, but what didn't work? Don't give the lame answer of "Everything" because both you and the rest of the
Maybe I am just unique here but of the 8 people that I work with that used an iPhone 1 year ago 7 of them switched to Android after I let them use my phone and they say they are never looking back. The 1 person that has not switched is a self proclaimed "Apple fanboy" and buys every single product that Apple releases.
"The two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." -Harlan Ellison
Funny. I felt the same way about the iPhone when I switched to an iPhone 4 from my Droid1. Although the interface was pretty, and 'satisfying' to use in how it was responsive and animated, I felt the functions that would make it a good PDA and phone were lacking. I have now switched to a Samsung Galaxy S2. I like it, but what I dislike most is the Samsung Touchwiz interface, which tries to be more iPhone like than the standard Android. I'm looking forward to rooting it, and putting a proper Android interface on it.
1) Jobs "borrowed" the idea for a GUI from Xerox Parc.
2) Jobs' very first product was a box which enabled stealing
from the phone company via illegal access to WATS lines.
The theme here is that Jobs wanted to be the only one who
engaged in ripoffs of one sort or another.
I find myself thinking it is not entirely a bad thing that this
Jobs character is gone. And I am typing this on a Mac.
I'm sorry he's dead but I'm not sorry he's gone.
Coming from Jobs this was actually a strong compliment. "Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal" via Jobs which he flat out lifted from Picasso. Steve Jobs accomplished an awful lot in his 56 years I won't deny that. However he was also prone to stratospheric egotism, which i think might be affecting his judgment in this case. I am certain there are aspects in HTC's SenseUI flavored Android that were directly influenced by iOS. Do we know what those features were? Are those features native to the horrendous SenseUI or of Android itself? Many of the claims I have seen had prior art that was easily accessible. Can anyone point out patented ideas that are novel and unique without prior art that was stolen by HTC SenseUI Android, and Android as a whole? Or is this a copyright complaint like the slab shape Galaxy tab 10.1 argument?
"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.
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
RIM did some great stuff in its day, and for that reason was wildly successful. Everybody was trying to copy RIM -- even Android looked to RIM for what to copy (not look to for inspiration for new directions, but simply copy).
But Apple didn't go that way, decided full touch with no keyboard was the way to go for a smart phone. Apple was wildly successful, thus everybody wanted to copy Apple, including Google, which changed Android's direction.
There were so many slab based finger gestured multi-touch phones with almost no buttons before the iphone. Really?
The ability to install applications without going through the carrier buy in was pretty novel too.
And Eric Schmidt was on the apple board, and at the iphone intro so google knew were this was going. If you look at andriod prototypes before the iphone, they are basically blackberrys.
One expects the ideas to be copied eventually, but not verbatim. I think Jobs was in the right to be pissed. They worked on this thing for years. Even microsoft came up with a different UI, which I think is better for everyone than to have companies just cloning.
Speaking NOT as a fanboy, but as a gadget fan:
In hindsight, it's easy to say the iPhone is just another smartphone, but at the time it was introduced, it was nothing like any phone that came before it. Yes, its individual features -- touch screen, icons, internal antenna, multitouch UI, etc., all existed -- but until the iPhone came along, they had not been put together quite like this before (To use the hackneyed "car" metaphor: wheels, internal combustion engines and axles predate the automobile, but this doesn't mean the car was nothing new when it came along).
Just look at marketing materials from the major carriers in 2006 -- flip phones and candy bars were the typical (practically only) form factors available before the iPhone was revealed in January 2007. It took very little time for all that to change, but when it comes right down to it -- there was nothing akin to the modern smartphone before the iPhone.
It's pretty silly to suggest today's wide array of multi-touch handheld computers have nothing to do with its design and success.
You sir are a dupe. The Macintosh and Lisa projects were well underway before Jobs Ever heard of the PARC XEROX project. You should google Jeff Raskin who created the mac and learn he was planning it well before 1979. Here's a bit of history:
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/parc.html
the real issue here however is not that but rather, the fact the Schimtt was on apple's board of directors. This is why it is stealing not copying.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
O RLY? I didn't actually know about it until someone posted it earlier in this article, but the LG Prada came out shortly before the iPhone and they look very similar. In fact LG accused Apple of copying their phone since they revealed it as part of a design competition (and won) several months prior to the announcement of the iPhone.
So it seems to me either that Apple stole the idea and polished it up, or as has often the case in history, technology was headed in a certain direction and several people came up with similar ideas at the same time, and Apple just made the most popular implementation of that idea.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
It's funny how people who seem to be extremely motivated and successful get labeled as an "asshole". It's been said of Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, James Cameron, Frank LLoyd Wright, Henry Ford, Charles Lindberg, etc. The list is really quite large.
Makes you wonder who is labeling these guys assholes? Perhaps it's all of the idiot people that work around them.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Google users be they on Android or when you use gmail, google search etc... are not seen by Google as their customers. You are seen by Google as their product which they sell the advertisers. The "free" services they provide you is like feed to a cattle which is why Eric Schmitt has so little respect for privacy of users of google services. If you are fine with being viewed as cattle and fine with having to upgrade your handset to get the latest release let alone a specific feature then stick with Android if you want.
For all of the "faults" that some of you would see concerning Apple's behaviour, they are a customer/consumer focused company. The average consumer is who they see to be their customer and they are interested in selling products and services to those customers.
Despite all of the grousing about siri being only an iPhone 4S feature, look at the comparison of the iPhone 3GS getting almost all of the features of iOS 5 despite having been released over two years ago originally and iOS 5 even brought features from iOS 4 that were previously iPhone 4 exclusive to the 3GS like custom alert tones. Given that they rolled out that feature on the 3GS, I would guess that iOS 6 will bring Siri to the iPhone 4 when the iPhone 5 comes out.
Show me a single Android handset that was released even 6 months ago that is user upgradable to the latest Android version without any rooting or other hacks regardless of your carrier.
Android handsets are cheap and disposable and because of this, they want you to continue buying new versions and that is why they will not offer updates to firmware for anything but the latest model (if even that). This all stems back to the fact that they don't see you as their customer. They see you as a channel for advertising revenue.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
In a far off, seldom visited corner of my companies campus is a wall of patents granted over the years. A few weeks ago I found myself browsing them and noticed one of them was for a proximity sensor on a phone. In this case it was designed to automatically switch the phone from normal mode to speaker phone depending on proximity but it doesn't take a genius to see other uses for this. It was granted in 1998. Apple "steals" from other companies just as much as they claim people steal from them.
Stop rehashing the same myth over and over. Jobs paid Xerox PARC $1M in pre-IPO Apple stock for the right to look over their technology.
"So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if parc would “open its kimono.” A lot of haggling ensued. Jobs was the fox, after all, and parc was the henhouse. What would he be allowed to see? What wouldn’t he be allowed to see? Some at parc thought that the whole idea was lunacy, but, in the end, Xerox went ahead with it."
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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 veneer of certainty that conventional doctors present can certainly comforting, but is - in its own way - a kind of reality distortion field.
Be careful about doing exactly what any single doctor tells you - research, be informed, get 2nd opinions, all that time consuming stuff.
For example, I've read about thyroid issues where the plan is to nuke it (literally, with radioactive iodine) to kill off the thyroid tissue. I would save that for like Plan Q, maybe - after plan A, B, C etc... didn't work out.
(if I can believe what they wrote about Jobs delaying treatment, that is simply regrettable wishful thinking - then again, I didn't know that a subset of pancreatic cancer was actually survivable - I thought it was pretty much a fatal, quick and unpleasant end).
Anyway, thankfully I haven't had to deal with cancer issues in my family... but I would research the hell out anything that did turn up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghandi#Accusations_of_racism
Plenty to be found via Google too.
I completely misread the title at first. Like someone wanted to hire people who can creatively destroy robots.
I am not devoid of humor.