James Delahunty
13 Jul 2010 10:34
Larry Page, co-founder of search giant Google has accused Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs of attempting to re-write history, and asserted that Google did not "follow" Apple into the mobile phone market. Page is referring to comments made by Jobs in February at an Apple town hall meeting, in which he blasted Google's "don't be evil" mantra as "bullshit" and accused the company of trying to kill the iPhone.
In a videotaped conference in June, Jobs echoed the same comments. However, Page has told Reuters that Jobs words are a "little bit of re-writing history."
"We had been working on Android a very long time, with the notion of producing phones that are Internet enabled and have good browsers and all that because that did not exist in the marketplace," Page said. "I think that characterization of us entering after is not really reasonable."
Google acquired Android Inc., a mobile startup, in 2005 and announced its Android mobile operating system in November 2007. The iPhone had debuted in January of that year. After the Android OS was announced and handsets rolled out that featured the operating system, relations between the two tech giants soured increasingly.
At Google's annual developers conference this year, vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said that Google developed Android to avoid a "Draconian future, a future where one man, one company, one device and one carrier would be our only choice." Behind him, a picture read, "Not a Future We Want, 1984."
The stunt mirrors Apple's portrayal of IBM when it first launched the Macintosh, referencing of the George Orwell classic that describes the totalitarium regime known as "The Party."