Google Larry Page is Wrong, Steve Jobs Really Hated Google

Google's Larry Page caused a stir last week when he said that the anger Steve Jobs expressed over Android was just "for show" and that the late Apple co-founder was actually a nice guy at heart. Not so, Walter Isaacson insisted Wednesday—Jobs really was the boiling cauldron of "thermonuclear" fury depicted in Isaacson's authorized biography.

Page stirred up quite a hornet's nest when, in an interview with Forbes, Google's chief executive dismissed Jobs' angry criticism of Android as merely a tactic to get Apple employees to "rally around" a rivalry with a competitor. That take seemed at odds with what Jobs pretty plainly said about Android in Isaacson's best-selling biography of the iconic tech leader, and it also didn't endear Page to Apple fans much when he added that Google was above such tawdry motivational methods, anyway.

Now, in what's probably the closest approximation to the Marshall McLuhan scene in Annie Hall that we can hope for now that Jobs himself is gone, Isaacson has weighed in. The biographer told a crowd at the Royal Institute in London on Wednesday that Jobs meant exactly what he said in Isaacson's biography, according to MacWorld UK. In case you've forgotten what that was, All Things D helpfully points to the expletive-laced money quote:

"Our lawsuit is saying, 'Google, you f**king ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.' Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google's products—Android, Google Docs—are s**t."

Isaacson elaborated on the reasoning behind Jobs' anger, tying it to what he experienced during his first stint at Apple in the 1980s. That's when Microsoft lifted the Macintosh's groundbreaking graphical user interface for its own Windows operating system and, sin of sins, began to license it out "promiscuously" instead of maintaining a closed hardware-software ecosystem like the one Jobs had created at Apple.

In Jobs' view, according to the biographer, Microsoft staked out its dominant market position largely on the strength of ripping off Apple. Google, Jobs believed, was doing the same thing all over again by allegedly "stealing" Apple's iPhone technology for Android.

"It's almost copied verbatim by Android," Isaacson told MacWorld UK. "And then they license it around promiscuously. And then Android starts surpassing Apple in market share, and this totally infuriated him. It wasn't a matter of money. He said: 'You can't pay me off, I'm here to destroy you'."

Apple is embroiled in several lawsuits with Google and makers of mobile devices that use the Android operating system, but Isaacson said he believes Tim Cook, Jobs' successor as Apple's chief executive, will "handle things differently" and settle those legal disputes.