Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
NEW BATTLES
And Echoes of Old Ones
Google: Open versus Closed
A few days after he unveiled the iPad in January 2010, Jobs held a “town hall” meeting with 
employees at Apple’s campus. Instead of exulting about their transformative new product, 
however, he went into a rant against Google for producing the rival Android operating system. 
Jobs was furious that Google had decided to compete with Apple in the phone business. “We did 
not enter the search business,” he said. “They entered the phone business. Make no mistake. They 
want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.” A few minutes later, after the meeting moved on to 
another topic, Jobs returned to his tirade to attack Google’s famous values slogan. “I want to go 
back to that other question first and say one more thing. This ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra, it’s bullshit.”
Jobs felt personally betrayed. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt had been on the Apple board during 
the development of the iPhone and iPad, and Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had 
treated him as a mentor. He felt ripped off. Android’s touchscreen interface was adopting more 
and more of the features—multi-touch, swiping, a grid of app icons—that Apple had created.
Jobs had tried to dissuade Google from developing Android. He had gone to Google’s 
headquarters near Palo Alto in 2008 and gotten into a shouting match with Page, Brin, and the 
head of the Android development team, Andy Rubin. (Because Schmidt was then on the Apple 
board, he recused himself from discussions involving the iPhone.) “I said we would, if we had 
good relations, guarantee Google access to the iPhone and guarantee it one or two icons on the 
home screen,” he recalled. But he also threatened that if Google continued to develop Android and 
used any iPhone features, such as multi-touch, he would sue. At first Google avoided copying 
certain features, but in January 2010 HTC introduced an Android phone that boasted multi-touch 
and many other aspects of the iPhone’s look and feel. That was the context for Jobs’s 
pronouncement that Google’s “Don’t be evil” slogan was “bullshit.”
So Apple filed suit against HTC (and, by extension, Android), alleging infringement of twenty 
of its patents. Among them were patents covering various multi-touch gestures, swipe to open, 
double-tap to zoom, pinch and expand, and the sensors that determined how a device was being 
held. As he sat in his house in Palo Alto the week the lawsuit was filed, he became angrier than I 
had ever seen him:
Our lawsuit is saying, “Google, you fucking 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 shit.
A few days after this rant, Jobs got a call from Schmidt, who had resigned from the Apple 
board the previous summer. He suggested they get together for coffee, and they met at a café in a 
Palo Alto shopping center. “We spent half the time talking about personal matters, then half the 
time on his perception that Google had stolen Apple’s user interface designs,” recalled Schmidt. 
When it came to the latter subject, Jobs did most of the talking. Google had ripped him off, he said 
in colorful language. “We’ve got you red-handed,” he told Schmidt. “I’m not interested in settling. 
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.” They resolved nothing.

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Underlying the dispute was an even more fundamental issue, one that had unnerving historical 
resonance. Google presented Android as an “open” platform; its open-source code was freely 
available for multiple hardware makers to use on whatever phones or tablets they built. Jobs, of 
course, had a dogmatic belief that Apple should closely integrate its operating systems with its 
hardware. In the 1980s Apple had not licensed out its Macintosh operating system, and Microsoft 
eventually gained dominant market share by licensing its system to multiple hardware makers and, 
in Jobs’s mind, ripping off Apple’s interface.
The comparison between what Microsoft wrought in the 1980s and what Google was trying to 
do in 2010 was not exact, but it was close enough to be unsettling—and infuriating. It exemplified 
the great debate of the digital age: closed versus open, or as Jobs framed it, integrated versus 
fragmented. Was it better, as Apple believed and as Jobs’s own controlling perfectionism almost 
compelled, to tie the hardware and software and content handling into one tidy system that assured 
a simple user experience? Or was it better to give users and manufacturers more choice and free 
up avenues for more innovation, by creating software systems that could be modified and used on 
different devices? “Steve has a particular way that he wants to run Apple, and it’s the same as it 
was twenty years ago, which is that Apple is a brilliant innovator of closed systems,” Schmidt 
later told me. “They don’t want people to be on their platform without permission. The benefits of 
a closed platform is control. But Google has a specific belief that open is the better approach, 
because it leads to more options and competition and consumer choice.”
So what did Bill Gates think as he watched Jobs, with his closed strategy, go into battle against 
Google, as he had done against Microsoft twenty-five years earlier? “There are some benefits to 
being more closed, in terms of how much you control the experience, and certainly at times he’s 
had the benefit of that,” Gates told me. But refusing to license the Apple iOS, he added, gave 
competitors like Android the chance to gain greater volume. In addition, he argued, competition 
among a variety of devices and manufacturers leads to greater consumer choice and more 
innovation. “These companies are not all building pyramids next to Central Park,” he said, poking 
fun at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store, “but they are coming up with innovations based on competing 
for consumers.” Most of the improvements in PCs, Gates pointed out, came because consumers 
had a lot of choices, and that would someday be the case in the world of mobile devices. 
“Eventually, I think, open will succeed, but that’s where I come from. In the long run, the 
coherence thing, you can’t stay with that.”
Jobs believed in “the coherence thing.” His faith in a controlled and closed environment 
remained unwavering, even as Android gained market share. “Google says we exert more control 
than they do, that we are closed and they are open,” he railed when I told him what Schmidt had 
said. “Well, look at the results—Android’s a mess. It has different screen sizes and versions, over 
a hundred permutations.” Even if Google’s approach might eventually win in the marketplace, 
Jobs found it repellent. “I like being responsible for the whole user experience. We do it not to 
make money. We do it because we want to make great products, not crap like Android.”