Going to be flat out blunt…. bullshit!
I don’t know what it is with all of these people coming out after the fact in trying to put their own spin on what they think Steve Jobs was thinking. The facts are this; Jobs was pretty much a black and white person, yet conflicted when it came to what was right and wrong to the point where contradictions naturally existed. Some of that isn’t unfamiliar to me because I saw this in everyday Japanese society. Jobs said what was on his mind even if it lacked tact from a social point of view. There is no other way to interpret what he told Isaacson as to how he felt about Google (which included former CEO Eric Schmidt and founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin). But I digress…
Page puts his own spin on how he interpreted Jobs’ “thermonuclear on Android” comment by saying it was for show, to give Apple some sort of focus to rally around. He seems to gloss over the fact that in the biography, Isaacson noted that Jobs was going to tell Page to f*ck off, but decided not to do that because he felt an obligation to be a mentor to the next generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, just as Bill Hewlett and David Packard were to him. Again, that’s the complex personality behind Jobs. If it were me, I wouldn’t want to have anything further to do with a person or business that screwed me over in that manner (I’ve learned to not dwell on it where such trivial matters are for the most part, expunged — BUT I do have a long memory to quickly recall past experiences when such individuals/businesses are on my personal blacklist). And that’s the thing that people most often forget in a work place setting especially when they come across as complete asshats and jerks. I’ve been on selection and hiring committees; when a bunch of names popped up in the application pool, by my one vote, some of those ended up closer to or directly in to the circular “filing cabinet” due to issues like attitude and work ethic (as either colleague or bosses).
Now Page isn’t an idiot by any stretch of the imagination. He went to Stanford where he and Brin started up Google (just as Jerry Yang and David Filo created Yahoo while they were also attending Stanford). Sometimes though, people who are smart in this manner are lacking in other areas. Page’s attempted re-interpretation of what Jobs and Apple meant, borders on self-delusion. Of course when your net worth is billions, you can bend perceptions because to most people, these people must have done something right and know a lot to get to that point. Reality is that sometimes its a combination of that and being in the right place at the right time.
As mentioned, before Google, Yang and Filo were the geniuses behind what became known as Internet Search. I remember when Yang and Filo were running what became Yahoo, on a server at Stanford (one of the machines I recall was named Akebono). When I submitted sites for entries into their directory, Yang was the one who normally responded back when they were added. Out of those humble beginnings, Yahoo ended up growing into a global giant. Then Google came onto the scene in similar humble fashions but with a different take on search. The rest is history as to how Google eventually overtook Yahoo.
The point behind this simple tangent is this: there are always smart innovators who can quickly disrupt the status quo. Facebook is not going to immune from this either as they did the same thing to the previous leader, Myspace. When the founders of a company are still there, this creates a conundrum known as “founders myopia”. In extremely crude terms, what this often times means is that founders often times have their heads up their ass in certain areas. Founders have a certain vision in mind as to what their goals are and what they want to accomplish. Thus it is easy to develop a narrowed funnel vision where you end up focusing too much that you end up missing the forest for the trees. I write from personal experience in my own travails in that realm where when I was attempting to devise my own media portal based on Apple’s QuickTime platform, that I completely didn’t see the benefits which Macromedia’s (which Adobe later acquired) Flash brought. Neither did many others as before YouTube, online video sites were mainly Real or Windows Media. When Hurley, Chen, and Karim opened up YouTube though, it quickly obsoleted the other formats for online streaming. For the media related stuff that I was working on at the time, early YouTube was not an option because they compressed the video way too much with low bit rates. I couldn’t see beyond myself though because Flash was just a container format like QuickTime — but because YouTube back then used a lower quality CODEC (compared to H.264) and low bit rates resulting in some really poor quality video, my erroneous perception was that Flash was crap for transporting higher quality streams.
Digressing, the key point of the above is MYOPIA. And that’s an issue because this seems to be a trend with Google as a whole when it comes to wanting to know even more about you (not just personal information but also your activities). The average person of course does not care or if they really are concerned, aren’t going to participate online. As written before, I’ve chosen to participate but in a very small, purposeful, and controlled manner. When it became apparent that the future growth would be in mobile platforms, my take is that Google panicked in potentially losing control of search on mobile. Why? Because 96% of Google’s revenue is from advertisement via online search. While the iPhone was initially panned by the tech web because it lacked a physical keyboard, a native application environment, 3G cellular, a removable battery, etc, etc, etc, it’s actual success in the market became a classic disrupting event. But it was also clear that the iPhone was locked down – which meant playing by Apple’s rules. That scared the crap out of Google. Before the iPhone was even unveiled in January 2007, Android as a platform existed, but all of the physical form factors and UI on the devices sort of mirrored RIM’s BlackBerry (this point is important for what I’ll be writing below). The iPhone quickly changed Google’s direction with Android. The objective? To offer an “open” alternative that any vendor and carrier could utilize. Unsurprisingly, the uptake was quick because handset vendors were way behind on the firmware side of things (they and the carriers do not care about user experience). The underlying motive of course was to insure that mobile devices (especially the new and growing smartphone segment) would not be controlled by Apple with its “app-centric” approach for content (and potentially cutting Google’s lucrative web-centric advertisement revenue out of the loop).
The result; Google took what was once, a very close and meaningful partnership with Apple, and completely shit all over it. Hardcore Apple haters will of course see it completely differently. It’s a matter of perspective. But I’ve always stated before that any rational person will know that Apple didn’t create a lot of the technology which they brought to market. What they’ve done is found ways to bring it all together in a meaningful fashion at cost effective prices. All of this stuff was created in research labs, but they were relatively crude or just too damn expensive to bring to market. My rhetorical question is if all of this stuff was so obvious after the fact, then why was there no other company which at the time, had far more resources to bring something meaningful to the marketplace, before Apple? That same question can be applied to the iPad. The answer isn’t simple because it really is a question of the culture which has been put in place at Apple; where it’s about hardware + software + services being tightly integrated to bring about a uniform and consistent user experience. Sony is going to try with this integrated approach after having acquired long time partner Ericsson. The problem for Sony though is they do not have full control on the software side. For their PC’s, they’ve relied upon Microsoft Windows. On their smart phones, are they going to rely on Windows 7 Phone or Android? That part of the equation is so obvious that the rest of the executive level propaganda is just full of hot air. Apple didn’t get to iOS the easy way. What the end user doesn’t see is the years of engineering experience, built up via a decade of solving the difficult problems. Only after the fact, are some of the solutions obvious to everyone else.
The thing is that you cannot easily replicate the way Apple works because its a way of thinking across the entire company (in terms of its product design). Google has been an engineering driven company which is why they can do stuff like web services so well. In contrast, I’ve always considered Apple’s online web initiatives as poor. Part of that I attribute to Jobs because all of this online stuff from behind the scenes, is really mundane and often times, unsexy. And those who had direct experience with Jobs, knew that his attention wouldn’t be on those boring stuff. So you end up with half-assed stuff with MobileMe or an enterprise group which lacked the proper resources to do their jobs effectively in that market. Apple in contrast to Google, melds tech with the arts and humanities where not only the technical aspects are valued, but also those intangible qualities which touch people at a deeper level. Geeks and techies are often times on a different wavelength which makes it easier for that group to lump all Apple users into the category of mindless sheep.
My point again is that Google’s revenue is 96% ad driven via online search. It’s a very high margin business. But they want to own it all and had no intention of ceding it to anyone else. So the objective is to make sure they can continue to control the flow of personal information and activity by making the Android platform a viable alternative to the iPhone. Thus the requirement to quickly boost marketshare in order to make it attractive to developers. Thus with little regard for the close partnership that Google and Apple had, that myopic vision of Google’s primary revenue source, meant doing what they had to do. This is ALL based on executive driven decisions. And during that time, then Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on Apple’s board (personally invited by Steve Jobs). I’m pretty sure that before Google morphed Android from its BlackBerry like form factor to ones that were more touch based, that Schmidt had been given a tour of some of what Apple was working on before the iPhone was publicly unveiled. That betrayal is what comes across in Jobs’ thermonuclear comment. Only after it became clear that Google would be competing in the mobile space, was it that Schmidt began recusing himself from meetings covering the iPhone (a technicality by that point) until he finally resigned when even the government was looking at the potential conflict of interests between the two companies.
Unsurprisingly, Google’s leadership (including Page) do not see anything wrong from their point of view. Their whole business model cements that fact as well especially back in the earlier days when there were content holders who objected to how Google scraped their sites, and used content they did not own to generate advertisement revenue. Thus from my perspective, Google sees no wrong in using yours and my own personal information for driving their main business. Given that reality, I might as well throw sites like Google a well controlled set of data so that they can try to craft ad sets which might appeal to me (the fact again is that on my computers, I don’t see any of them because I use an aggressive multi-tier filtering approach). All of this provides some insight on why Page said what he said in this Businessweek interview. IMHO though, his perspective and interpretation of what Jobs really meant is likely off base; and an attempt to do what Schmidt tried to do right after Jobs passed away — to try and rewrite history. So convenient when that person is no longer around.
Walter Isaacson however quickly responded and made it clear that Jobs was not beating around the bush; that he was honestly infuriated at Google. The reasons are clear as it all leads back to what happened with the Macintosh. Again, rational people acknowledge that Apple didn’t invent that user interface paradigm. Unfortunately, revisionist history is consistently present in the tech world because its far easier for detractors on both sides to twist the facts in their favor, even when the facts are presented directly on Stanford’s own site regarding PARC. It’s no different than the bozo’s who keep bringing up Microsoft’s $150 million investment back in 1997 as saving Apple from bankruptcy. Yes, Apple’s cash burn rate was high but without the meaningful steps outlined at Macworld Boston, that $150 million would not have amounted to much to save the company (as the irrational Apple hating revisionists like to erroneously claim). The company had to take some difficult steps and attack the problems one-by-one in order to create a solid foundation to build upon. That prior near death experience, plus the experience gathered along the way, results in what we see today.
