Was Steve Jobs’s anger and hatred towards Google’s Android all for show? According to Google CEO, Larry Page, yes, it was. During a conversation/interview with Bloomberg, Page says that he believes that Jobs put on a show to “rally the troops,” so to speak.
I think the Android differences were actually for show. I had a relationship with Steve. I wouldn’t say I spent a lot of time with him over the years, but I saw him periodically. [...]
I think [the fury around Android] served their interests. For a lot of companies, it’s useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that.
If you’ve read the Steve Jobs autobiography (by Walter Isaacson), towards the end (of the book and his life), Jobs invited Page over to his house to discuss business, as Page had only recently taken over the reins of Google . Jobs was a sort of mentor, not only to Page, but also to Sergey Brin, the other Google co-Founder. Jobs was kind, in saying that these guys are the future of this industry and he wanted to help them. Which sounds like a different person, who earlier in the book said he would spend every dime Apple had to destroy Android. If needed, he’d wage “thermonuclear war” on them, because as he said, “Android is a stolen product.”
So was Jobs really just putting on a show? He was a master showmen and could get people to believe in whatever he wanted, or is Page just putting on a show himself, trying defuse the whole tension between Apple and Android? Without Jobs’s version of the story, we may never know.
Source: Bloomberg Businessweek