Even as it became increasingly clear to Steve Jobs that these finals months would be his last, the man who so brilliantly led Apple to clench top position amongst the tech titans while also triggering some of the most enduring technology trends of the decade, was gracious enough to allow Walter Isaacson unprecedented access to him and his family in order to compile the most authoritative autobiography of the late digital mastermind. Now those intimate moments spent with Jobs has come under renewed scrutiny as Apple launched yet another salvo of lawsuits against Android manufacturers such as HTC and Samsung.
In the book, Isaacson highlights the intense hostility Hobs harboured against Google for developing and sharing the Android system with Apple’s rival manufacturers. The book further states that Jobs was “livid’ when HTC Incredible was released back in 2010.
“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,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.” The fact that Google’s Eric Schmidt was on Apple’s board even while the company was designing its own mobile platform angered Jobs as well. Insiders claim that Jobs considered this a form of ultimate betrayal.
Certainly, this is one side of the story and no matter how great the iPhone is, industry experts readily agree that Apple also copied some features from rivals, mostly in the form of software, which is more difficult to patent. Another question is will Apple change approach towards its rivals now that Jobs is gone. The answer may well be no, at-least in the short term. As its rivals become genuinely better and more capable in terms of both technology and patents, Apple ought to tread with a bit of caution.
