Why Steve Jobs Went 'Thermonuclear' over Android (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Why Steve Jobs Went 'Thermonuclear' over Android (2014)

pcmag.com

49 pointsthunderbong53 comments

> "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 thermonuclear war on this.

What about all the technology (and engineers) at XEROX PARC that Jobs stole from there? Funny how history repeats itself.

That was literally given to him/Apple, with Xerox's permission. Being given something is never theft.

Jobs famously muscled his way in and took their ideas, albeit from a dumb board.

Famous story:

Steve Jobs confronted Bill Gates after he announced Windows' GUI OS. "You’re stealing from us!” Bill replied "I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

Still not your idea or product though, isn't it.

Xerox the company gave it away seeing no commercial value in the invention.

Just want to say Thank You. It does get really tiring the very few on HN have to fight the misinformation about a lot of things in tech.

Maybe they did see the commercial value, but they were more FOSS-minded people thinking this technology must be free for the world to use. But I don't know any of the specifics of this particular transfer of IP.

Xerox, FOSS minded? No way in hell.

> I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product.

First time I'm reading up on it, but seems Android was both conceived as an idea and worked on as a mobile idea before Jobs started thinking about the iPhone?

> Android Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California, in October 2003 by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Chris White. [...] The early intentions of the company were to develop an advanced operating system for digital cameras, and this was the basis of its pitch to investors in April 2004 [...] and five months later it had diverted its efforts and was pitching Android as a handset operating system that would rival Symbian and Microsoft Windows Mobile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)

> In 2005, when Steve Jobs began planning the iPhone, he had a choice to either "shrink the Mac, which would be an epic feat of engineering, or enlarge the iPod". Jobs favored the former approach but pitted the Macintosh and iPod teams, led by Scott Forstall and Tony Fadell, respectively, against each other in an internal competition, with Forstall winning by creating iPhone OS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS

Would seem like Android was ideated around 2004, while iOS ("iPhone OS") was ideated in 2005.

Could also just be an attempt at rewriting history, wouldn't be the first time...

Reportedly, the original Android was more of a Blackberry ripoff, with a keyboard and directional keys instead of a touchscreen. Once they saw what the iPhone was doing, they quickly pivoted and changed the whole product, so the Android we see today has nothing to do with the Android of 2004.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/building-android-a-4...

I think this was just more of a function of technology. Good quality capacitive touchscreens only really started to become available in the mid 2000s, and even the early ones weren't that great (e.g. no multi-touch). Without this you're forced into using keyboards if you want to have any kind of usable interface for typing, or you do something like the graffiti writing system that psion PDAs had in the 90s.

No they were just pressure sensitive screens. You could use a finger to navigate but again not as accurate. The solution instead was to perfect one handed navigation which was what palm os 5 did and input writing with either a keyboard (handheld/onscreen) or graffiti like you said.

The CoRecursive podcast has an episode with Chet Haase where he specifically outlines how they were cloning BlackBerry and then had to drop everything and rebuild when they heard about the iPhone OS. He directly states that Android wouldn’t have had a touch interface if the iPhone didn’t exist.

GUI interfaces using a capacitive touch screen became good because of iPhone, not as part of a natural progression of technology.

But I had a Samsung PalmOS phone with no keyboard or numpad or dpad, and a full color touch home screen grid of 3rd party app icons, in full final production in the hands of users like me, in 2000 or 2001.

Samsung SPH-i300

There were also operating systems like Palm OS, Symbian and Pocket PC / Windows Mobile before either of them.

Steve was probably complaining/accusing Eric, that Google bought Android because they've seen what Apple is doing and realized that it is a big deal. Plus, perhaps what Apple was doing also shaped/influenced Android in the later stages before release.

I think this is mostly a case of Steve being an arsehole. Sure Android copied the design style from Apple but Apple themselves copied if from Sony. https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189309/apple-sony-iphone...

You are allowed to make a product that is a bit like an existing one out there.

Xerox sold access to PARC to Jobs in return for access to pre-IPO stock in Apple.

> "You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"

> But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.

> "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

https://folklore.org/A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.html

Immortalized in movie form: https://youtu.be/UFcb-XF1RPQ&t=10

If you listen closely you can almost hear the faint singing of consumers rejoicing that he failed to eliminate all the competition.

Compare the Alto to the Mac.

Now compare the original Android to Blackberry (which it copied first) then compare it to the iPhone, which it copied later.

The Alto and Mac were both WIMP interfaces, but had very different distinct personalities.

Exactly, it shows how much Jobs was disconnected from reality. When others do it, it's no longer "great artists steal"?

Or much more closely, Nokia's Maemo running on a Nokia 770. The nokia 770 had more resolution, actually supports apps and app store (Apple only supports weblets in gen 1), had an icon based UI, and supported a stylus.

Sure the apple had a nicer touch screen and WAN, but the grid of icons to launch an app was very similar.

It is beyond me how a CEO can serve at any board, at all, let alone the CEO of one billion dollar corporation serving at the board of another billion dollar corporation.

There are potential issues with non-compete agreements, any and all deals between the companies, hiring and compensation of executives, board members actually having the time to do the job of a board member, and or course also sensitive information leaking to where it shouldn't.

Executives usually have quite a bit of leverage and have multiple ways of retaliating against a company, typically in the form of a lawsuit and dragging it on for years.

This is also the reason why C-suites are given "golden parachutes", because firing them may end up triggering a lengthy legal battle that neither party benefits from.

From one viewpoint, this is akin to a king marrying off his children to a rival kingdom.

Having your CEO on the board of another company helps drive alignment and collaboration. It’s a solid business strategy.

Sometime it drives long term alignment. Other times you end up letting a fox in the henhouse. In this case it sounds like Eric Schmidt was a fox.

But neither of those outcomes is desirable from a wider viewpoint. Society doesn’t benefit from companies only innovating by stealing from each other, nor does it benefit from active collusion.

Active collusion - right. Companies stealing from one another? I think it can be argued that the consumer benefits from corporations imitating the good ideas of other corporations. A world with Android and iOS is better than a world only with iOS.

Silicon Valley has a much looser definition of conflict of interest than most other industries.

Samsung SPH-i300 In the hands of ordinary users by 2000 or 2001.

No keyboard, no numpad, no d-pad, color touch screen, home screen with a grid of 3rd party app icons, even internet so those apps even include email and web browser.

So it was very much a smartphone like today, not just a palm pda, and one in the all-screen form not the Treo/Blackberry form.

The specs and tech are all 7 years earlier because the device is 7 years earlier. Neither Apple nor Android invented that screens got better and cell networks got 3g in that time etc.

All Apple did was have Steve's high standards to produce a product that didn't look and feel like every other normal silver painted plastic product (including the i300), with 7 years later tech.

That is something, and even something significant, but to try to say that Android is a stolen product is ridiculous, unless you want to say it was stolen from Samsung! But it wasn't stolen from them either. It just wasn't a new or unique idea in general by then. Devices with OS's and interfaces like that had already existed for many years, they just weren't phones simply because the cell network itself didn't exist yet.

And in 1993 there was:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton

* LTT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_e_zW8EXoY

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." — Ecclesiastes 1:9

Not a phone. I already said other devices with a similar form and ui already existed that just weren't phones. This would be one of those.

Although it is interesting that this Apple pda predates Palm pdas by several years. (and even coined the term pda?)

And also interesting that although it's Apple, it's not Steve. Steve killed it as soon as he came back.

This article insinuates Schmidt have leaked the iPhone to Google.

Poppycock.

https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-android-founde... if you believe Andy Rubin's recollection of events on January 2007 when Jobs announced the iPhone he had absolutely no idea.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/building-android-a-4... even in December 2007 the Android milestone build didn't have a finger friendly user interface, that'll only come in February 2008. The iPhone shipped 2007 summer.

Now whether the UI was stolen from the iPhone is a different matter and I do not want to enter that debate.

He was a bully and a tyrant, who's purported genius was built off the backs of far more worthy people.

Many, many executives are bullies and tyrants without shipping anything like what Apple shipped under Jobs.

> He was a bully and a tyrant, who's purported genius was built off the backs of far more worthy people.

Is a conductor of an orchestra "building off the backs of" other people? Or do the instrument players need to be talented and the conductor also has to be talented in a different way for a symphony to be preformed well? How about the coach of a sports team?

People drooling over the biggest asshole in tech history really makes me wonder what has gone wrong.

He was a major asshole, however he was very good at running tech companies and managing tech products. That's why people drool over him. Watch the YouTube videos from his Next days, and show me a corporate CEO on that level of competence and involvement who's not an asshole.

At least in his case, he was an asshole who actually made something good - not apologizing it, but in most cases it's assholes making up bullshit just to be assholes. Jobs made his employees a lot of money through Apple stock, others usually just take your life force and money away.

A conductor needs to be able to play an instrument among other things. Applying this to the tech / design world, I doubt Jobs could really design or build things.

Conductors also need to have great team work skills and empathy. Jobs was not known for that. He was known for being a petty jerk.

Jobs was a great salesman and story teller and yes, also a good curator.

10 leadership lessons from a conductor

https://taniamiller.com/10-leadership-lessons-i-have-learned...

Written by Tim Bajarin, who appeared on a few episodes of Computer Chronicles. I'm currently binge-watching episodes of it so I recognised the name.

As in "The computer Chronicles" channel on YouTube?

That's the one!

Jobs felt the same way about Windows when the truth was mostly that both Apple and Microsoft based their work on ideas from Xerox PARC.

Apple didn't own a touchscreen phone interface, lol. Android started earlier than iOS did, and was always, always significantly ahead of the curve.

Apple made the concept 'cool' and benefited from their loyalist userbase, but if anything Apple copied Android. Even simple things like widgets and app folders Apple didn't get for like 10 years. Honestly, it's shocking.

Apple obviously didn't originate the mobile OS, I can't help thinking these board level political, commercial and legal big-man shenanigans are of historical interest but not hugely relevant to guiding obvious technical paths other than in the stories some of them like to tell amongst themselves.

Even ChatGPT has problems with this:

https://imgur.com/a/DcMa1x6

There is no point in asking facts to ChatGPT.

I really enjoy reading these "old" articles and how the game finally "ended". Have to admit - most of these don't really end the way we thought, but great general knowledge and review.

Required viewing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_(film)

“Good artists copy; great artists steal” - attributed to Picasso

These guys in the Valley were all "borrowing" from each other all the time. This cross-pollination was what made fast progress such as we saw possible. They were so petty about it, it's kind of pathetic.

I think it was to Job's advantage that he left this world before social media really blew up. He was a brilliant product visionary but a pretty horrible human being.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-the-terrible-...

Apple 'stole' the rectangular capacitive touch screen form factor from the LG Prada [1,2] which they combined with their own operating system. Android which was initially targeted at devices with physical keyboards and pointing devices then 'stole' the form factor from Apple. Microsoft took the idea and ran with it to create their own multi-touch capacitive display devices, as did many others. Most fell by the wayside but let's all be glad that there are at least two competitors instead of a single vendor hogging this important market.

Jobs himself claimed that 'good artists copy, great artists steal' (another 'stolen' quote by the way [3]) so the pot could call the kettle black but that did not make him any less so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070403110422/http://www.applem...

[3] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/

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