Although the official biography of Steve Jobs won't be available for sale until Monday next week, the first details are already known. Some of them were revealed by biographer Walter Isaacson himself in a TV interview, others by the news agency Associated Press, which has already obtained a copy. Particularly surprising details have been revealed by AP's Michael Liedtke on Twitter.
The were apparently lots of tensions between Jobs and Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt which ultimately led to the ongoing patent war between Apple and the manufacturers of Android devices. As Isaacson says, Jobs fulminated against Android considering it "grand theft".
Schmidt was elected to Apple's board of directors 2006 but in 2009, it was announced that Schmidt would resign from the board of directors at Apple due to conflict of interests amid the growing competition between Google and Apple. Jobs felt betrayed and reacted with extreme anger, as HTC introduced an Android smartphone in January 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. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."
Even at a meeting with Schmidt, Jobs explained that he is not interested in a settlement of legal disputes: "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."
Of course, Jobs may have forgotten Apple using Xerox technology to initially create Lisa and the Macintosh. This actually made this incredible ideas available and affordable for the masses while Xerox didn't build and market for home-use. Also some of the new features in iOS 5 like the notification banner and wireless sync, do have an "Android touch".
Wondering whether Apple and Google could now come to an agreement...
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