Steve Job's: Android a 'stolen product'

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson's biography, which is being promoted in just about every book store I walk into in Taiwan (people here love him), details a meeting between Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt:


"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."

Jobs used an expletive to describe Android and Google Docs, Google's Internet-based word processing program. 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.

Read the AP article. Via The Loop. The book is available for pre-order on Amazon but will be released in a few days.

Edit: The publisher is releasing lots of the inflammatory quotes to garner interest (and I fell for it). I have regrets about linking to this, many already are, as there is more to this man than snippets of a conversation taken out of context. I've edited the above for brevity.

But one part which I believe to true is as lovely as Android is becoming, it was developed on the backs of others IP. And the companies that are using Android are already paying the licensing fees.