Image Credit: Daniel Adel, New York Times
And so the saga continues………….. What once seemed as a beautiful friendship and had many in the Washington DC Administration worried with Google and Apple working so closley together in harmony to prevent Microsoft from dominating the Smartphone industry has turned into a bitter rivalry. According to the NYT, the heart of the dispute is betrayal, or Jobs’ belief that Schmidt (a former Apple board member) “picked his pocket” by developing cellphones that “physically, technologically and spiritually resembled the iPhone.” Here’s how one especially feisty encounter is described:
“At one particularly heated meeting in 2008 on Google’s campus, Mr. Jobs angrily told Google executives that if they deployed a version of multitouch – the popular iPhone feature that allows users to control their devices with flicks of their fingers – he would sue. Two people briefed on the meeting described it as “fierce” and “heated.””
In recent news Apples has filed lawsuit against HTC (a phone manufacture for Google’s Android platrfrom) for infringing in 20 apple patents related to the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware. Wasn’t Apple who allegedly stole or lifted the ubiquitous graphical user interface (GUI) from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
XML co-creator Tim Bray on Monday said he has joined Google as a Developer Advocate, primarily for Android. The former Sun worker made the pick both because Android embraces an open-source, web-heavy philosophy but also as a direct opposition to Apple’s iPhone policies. Bray praised Apple’s hardware but couldn’t abide by the at times arbitrary filtering of the App Store, which he likened to censorships, his words for the iPhone are pretty harsh.
“The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger. I hate it.”
“Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other. I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.”
Yesterday on CNBC Jim Goldman picked up on the Jobs v. Schmidt meme and stated he has been told by many sources that, “Steve Jobs simply hates Eric Schmidt right now.”