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A new report examines how Google was able to ape the iPhone so quickly, but why its Android tablet efforts have lagged so far behind the iPad — and like many stories out of Cupertino, it all goes back to Steve Jobs.
Gizmodo has published a fascinating look at how the Apple-Google partnership soured so quickly, and why co-founder Steve Jobs was so determined to launch a full-scale “thermonuclear war” against the search giant.
As it turns out, it all comes back to how “Google’s leadership profoundly betrayed the longtime personal trust and friendship of Apple’s leadership in stealing what Steve Jobs believed were Apple’s most prized possessions.”
Google was an intimate partner in Apple’s efforts to launch the iPhone, particularly after the search giant’s CEO Eric Schmidt joined the company’s board in August, 2006. Just over two years later, Google released its first Android smartphone — and the rest is history.
The article points the finger at Schmidt for how Google was able to get an iPhone competitor to market so quickly, apparently using insider knowledge he gained while on the board of directors at Apple. However, Steve Jobs kept the iPad a complete secret from Schmidt, right up until he resigned from the Apple board in August, 2009 under pressure from the Federal Trade Commission, who found it anti-competitive for the two companies to share board members.
Just last week, Schmidt confessed that Google was “late to tablets,” which the report paints as “a potentially incriminating admission.”
“Isn’t it interesting that when Mr. Schmidt was on Apple’s board and aware of the iPhone, Google was not ‘late’ to the smart phone market (Google-Android now has dominant market share), but when Google’s Schmidt was out of the loop as a board director on the existence of the iPad, Google is somehow ‘late’ to the tablet market?” the report questions.
Interesting indeed.
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(Image courtesy of AllThingsD)
