Inside the Briefcase
Why Steve Jobs Was Wrong About Android Being a ‘Stolen’ Product
October 24, 2011 No CommentsSOURCE: eWeek
One of the many revelations in the biography of Steve Jobs from author Walter Isaacson is Jobs’ assertion that Android was a “stolen product.” According to Hayley Tsukayama’s report in The Washington Post, Jobs was furious about Android and vowed to spend all of Apple’s cash to destroy it. The problem is Jobs was wrong about Android. Or if he’s right, then the iPhone was also a stolen product.
The reason that Steve Jobs was wrong is fairly simple to see if you’ve watched technology product development over the years. Nearly every product grows on the work done before it and the iPhone (and iPod Touch) are no exception. Apple created a very nice design for the iPhone, a design that was innovative, included new ways of doing things and most of all was attractive. But the iPhone was a derivative of other products, and while it was an improvement over what came before it (as it should be), it still depended on the ideas developed in those earlier products.
