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New book quotes Steve Jobs as calling Android founder Andy Rubin “big, arrogant f***”

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs points to a member of the audience during a Q&A session at the end of the iPhone OS4 special event at Apple headquarters in Cupertino

Steve Jobs isn’t exactly a man known for keeping his thoughts to himself which is why excerpts from the upcoming book Dogfight found by Business Insider documenting the Google-Apple smartphone war are grabbing attention. According to the book written by Fred Vogelstein, Google was already working on its first Android-powered smartphone when Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007 but had to stop in its tracks…

When Apple launched the iPhone, Rubin recognized that his grand Android plan would have to be tossed out. In fact, Rubin watched the webcast from the back of a cab in Las Vegas even making the driver pull over so he could watch the entire presentation. According to the book, Rubin said: “Holy crap, I guess we’re not going to launch that phone.”

Ethan Beard, an early Android development executive told the author that “We knew that Apple was going to announce a phone. Everyone knew that. We just didn’t think it would be that good.” An unnamed Android engineer even went as far as to say their work on Android looked awful when compared to the iPhone: “What we had looked so … nineties.”

Vogelstein reports that Jobs was furious with Google, a revelation that has been so well documented it’s almost hard at this point to imagine Jobs not furious with anyone. Jobs was quoted as saying “Everything is a f**king rip off of what we’re doing.”

At this point in history Jobs had a good working relationships with Larry Page and Sergey Brin as well as having Eric Schmidt on the Apple board (As well as sharing directors Art Levinson and Bill Campbell). The book states that all three had been advising Jobs that their future smartphone platform was very different from the iPhone and Jobs took their words to heart…until he saw what they were working on.

Well, Jobs being Jobs requested a meeting with himself, Scott Forstall, the designer of the iPhone software and Google’s Larry Page, Alan Eustance and Andy Rubin. While the content and exchanges that actually took place behind closed doors are unknown, one Apple executive briefed by Jobs after the meeting said “It got incredibly personal…Jobs said that Rubin was steamed, telling him his position was anti-innovation. And this is where Steve was demeaning to Andy, saying Andy was trying to be like him, look like him, have the same haircut, the same glasses, the same style.”

Even as Apple got Google to make the changes Jobs wanted after the meeting, Vogelstein reports that Jobs told Google how to take things out of Android, not just what they couldn’t do with it. Rubin was apparently furious that his bosses didn’t stand up to Apple and considered quitting Google but obviously did not at that point. Rubin would go on to help Android dominate the smartphone world as the platform hits 80% global marketshare. Rubin never forgot that meeting though even hanging a sign that read “STEVE JOBS STOLE MY LUNCH MONEY” on his office white board.

Rubin may have had the last laugh with marketshare and Apple with profits, but one thing clear is that Steve Jobs will forever be remembered not only as a visionary, but a man who made no effort to hide his thoughts or feelings.

More from Vogelstein: Original iPhone radio engineer details the heart (and Scotch) pounding moments that lead up to the Steve Jobs iPhone announcement

Full Amazon excerpt:

The Moon Mission
The fifty-five miles from Campbell to San Francisco is one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Known as 280 to locals, it is one of the best places in Silicon Valley to spot a start-up tycoon speed-testing his Ferrari and one of the worst places for cell phone reception. For Andy Grignon in his Porsche Carrera, therefore, it was the perfect place for him to be alone with his thoughts early on January 8, 2007.

This wasn’t Grignon’s typical route to work. He was a senior engineer at Apple in Cupertino, the town just west of Campbell. His morning drive typically covered seven miles and took exactly fifteen minutes. But today was different. He was going to watch his boss, Steve Jobs, make history at the Macworld trade show in San Francisco. Apple fans had for years begged Jobs to put a cell phone inside their iPods so they could stop carrying two devices in their pockets. Jobs was about to fulfill that wish. Grignon and some colleagues would spend the night at a nearby hotel, and at 10:00 a.m. the following day they—along with the rest of the world—would watch Jobs unveil the first iPhone.

Getting invited to one of Jobs’s famous product announcements was supposed to be a great honor. It anointed you as a player. Only a few dozen Apple employees, including top executives, got an invite. The rest of the spots were reserved for Apple’s board of directors, CEOs of partners—such as Eric Schmidt of Google and Stan Sigman at AT&T—and journalists from around the world. Grignon got an invite because he was the senior engineer for all the radios in the iPhone. This is a big job. Cell phones do innumerable useful things for us today, but at their most basic they are fancy two-way radios. Grignon was in charge of the equipment that allowed the phone to be a phone. If the phone didn’t make calls, connect with Bluetooth headsets, or connect to Wi-Fi setups, Grignon had to answer for it. As one of the iPhone’s earliest engineers, he’d dedicated two and a half years of his life—often seven days a week—to the project. Few deserved to be there more than he did.

But as Grignon drove north, he didn’t feel excited. He felt terrified. Most onstage product demonstrations in Silicon Valley are canned. The thinking goes, why let bad Internet or cell phone connections ruin an otherwise good presentation? Jobs’s presentations were live, however. It was one of the things that made his shows so captivating. But for those in the background, such as Grignon, few parts of the job caused more stress. Grignon couldn’t remember the last time a Jobs show of this magnitude had gone sideways. Part of what made Steve Jobs such a legend was that noticeable product-demo glitches almost never happened. But Grignon found it hard to recall the last time Jobs was so unprepared going into a show.

Grignon had been part of the iPhone launch-preparation team at Apple and later at the presentation site in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. But he had rarely seen Jobs make it all the way through his ninety-minute show without a glitch. Jobs had been rehearsing for five days, yet even on the last day of rehearsals the iPhone was still randomly dropping calls, losing the Internet connection, freezing, or just shutting down.

“At first it was just really cool to be at rehearsals at all—kind of like a cred badge. ‘Fuck yeah, I get to hang out with Steve,’” Grignon said. Like everything else that surrounded Jobs, the preparations were as secret as a U.S. missile attack on Afghanistan. Those who were truly in felt as if they were at the center of the universe. From Thursday through the end of the following week, Apple completely took over Moscone. Backstage it built an eight-by-eight-foot electronics lab to house and test the iPhones. Next to that it built a greenroom with a sofa for Jobs. Then it posted more than a dozen security guards twenty-four hours a day in front of those rooms and at doors throughout the building. No one got in or out without having his or her ID electronically checked and compared with a master list that Jobs had personally approved. More security checkpoints needed to be cleared once visitors got inside. The auditorium where Jobs was rehearsing was off-limits to all but a small group of executives. Jobs was so obsessed with leaks that he tried to have all the contractors Apple had hired for the announcement—from people manning booths and doing demos to those responsible for lighting and sound—sleep in the building the night before his presentation. Aides talked him out of it.

“It quickly got really uncomfortable,” Grignon said. “Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued. It happened. But mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are fucking up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’ He was just very intense. And you would always feel an inch tall [when he was done chewing you out].” Grignon said that you would always ask yourself two questions during one of these lectures: “‘Is it my shit that broke this time?’ and ‘Is it the nth time it broke or the first time?’—because that actually mattered. The nth time would frustrate him, but by then he might have figured out a way around it. But if it was the first time, it added a whole new level of instability to the program.” Grignon, like everyone else at rehearsals, knew that if those glitches showed up during the real presentation, Jobs would not be blaming himself for the problems, he would come after people like Grignon. “It felt like we’d gone through the demo a hundred times and that each time something went wrong,” Grignon said. “It wasn’t a good feeling.”

*   *   *
The iPhone didn’t work right for a good reason; it wasn’t close to being finished. Jobs was showing off a prototype. He just didn’t want the public to know that. But the list of things that still needed to be done before the iPhone could be sold was enormous. A production line had yet to be set up. Only about a hundred iPhones even existed, all of them of varying degrees of quality. Some had noticeable gaps between the screen and the plastic edge, others had scuff marks on the screen. Thus no one in the public was allowed to touch an iPhone after Jobs unveiled it, despite a day of press briefings and a whole exhibit set up for them in the convention center. The worry was that even the best prototypes wouldn’t stand close scrutiny, Grignon said. They’d look fine at a distance and for Jobs’s demo, but if you held one in your hand, “You would laugh and say, ‘Wow, this thing really looks unfinished.’”

The phone’s software was in even worse shape. A big chunk of the previous four months had been consumed figuring out why the iPhone’s processor and its cell radio wouldn’t reliably communicate. This huge problem was akin to a car with an engine that occasionally doesn’t respond to the accelerator, or wheels that occasionally don’t respond to the brake pedal. “It almost brought the iPhone program to a halt,” Grignon said. “We had never seen a problem this complicated.” This was ordinarily not a problem for phone makers, but Apple’s obsession with secrecy had kept Samsung, the manufacturer of the phone’s processor, and Infineon, the maker of the phone’s cell radio, from working together until Apple, in desperation, flew teams of engineers from each company to Cupertino to help fix the problem.

Jobs rarely backed himself into corners like this. He was well-known as a master taskmaster, seeming to always know just how hard he could push his staff so that they delivered the impossible. But he always had a backup, a Plan B, that he could go to if his timetable was off. Six months prior he’d shown off Apple’s upcoming operating system, Leopard. But that was after letting the date for the final unveiling slip.

But Jobs had no choice but to show off the iPhone. He had given this opening keynote at every Macworld since he’d returned as Apple’s CEO in 1997, and because he gave public presentations only once or twice a year, he had conditioned Apple fans to expect big things from them. He’d introduced iTunes here, the iMac that looked like a fancy desk lamp, the Safari web browser, the Mac mini, and the iPod shuffle.

It wasn’t just his own company that Jobs had to worry about disappointing this time. AT&T was expecting Jobs to unveil the iPhone at Macworld too. In exchange for being the exclusive carrier of the iPhone in the United States, AT&T had given Jobs total control of the design, manufacture, and marketing of the iPhone. It had never done anything like this before. If Jobs didn’t launch on time, AT&T could back out of its deal. It’s not hard to explain that a product called the iPhone that couldn’t make calls would sell poorly. Days before, Jobs had flown to Las Vegas to give AT&T’s top mobile executives a limited demo of the iPhone. But they were expecting a full show at Macworld.

Lastly, the iPhone was truly the only cool new thing Apple was working on. The iPhone had been such an all-encompassing project at Apple that this time there was no backup plan. “It was Apple TV or the iPhone,” Grignon said. “And if he had gone to Macworld with just Apple TV [an experimental product back then], the world would have said, ‘What the hell was that?’”
*   *   *

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Comments

  1. Brianna Wu - 10 years ago

    Nothing like a smear piece on someone who is dead and can’t defend themselves. You stay classy!

  2. NQZ (@surgesoda) - 10 years ago

    You mean like an arrogant fuck who wouldn’t pay child support for his kid at first, or even aknowledge the kid was his? Oh wait…

    • Tim Jr. - 10 years ago

      Old, get over it, I know the kid did. As they got together and he ended up paying child support later in years.

      • NQZ (@surgesoda) - 10 years ago

        I know this — still scumbag behavior and still no excuse.

      • Tim Jr. - 10 years ago

        Of course there is he was a young idiot. Early 20s are you kidding? How many young adults have done something stupid like that? thousands millions? It’s rare when they grow up and finally realize they’re idiots that they admit it. At least he did.

        Life’s a lesson, not many learn from their mistakes. Which is the sad truth. Armchair quarterbacking someone else’s life is easy, people should focus more on their own lives.

      • Nicholas Vettese - 10 years ago

        But he is still a bigger scumbag for denying that child years of having a father. What is more important, being a father, or being a dick?

    • Mike Post (@PostTweetism) - 10 years ago

      You sound like a child with low EQ who latches onto a person’s worst qualities and can’t let it go.

      • Piliger Black - 10 years ago

        Well let’s remember how perfect he is himself ! Bless.

    • Alain Fleitas - 10 years ago

      way off topic bud. Company to Company Google straight ripped iOS

    • varera (@real_varera) - 10 years ago

      Oh, that is right to the point of the article. Or isn’t it?

    • tallestskil - 10 years ago

      Hey, thanks for pretending someone else’s transgressions (for which they atoned) magically absolve the focus’. When that line of thinking works for anyone, anywhere, at any time, you let us know.

      Lisa was at his side when he died, you know. FYI. They loved each other. Thought you might like to know that.

  3. rettun1 - 10 years ago

    lol

  4. porschinator - 10 years ago

    OK so Sergey was on the board of Apple during the development of iOS/iPhone and betrayed Steve’s trust and is one helluva good reason to fly off the handle when Android basically ripped off iOS. Its the main reason Android came out 9 months after iOS so it can be changed and take as many good ideas from iOS before release.

    This most likely brought out emotions from Jobs that are reminiscent to when Windows came out and how it made the competition billions on the back of Apple. Only good thing about Android is the fact that it now offers iOS competition and will only make iOS better.

    Also I love when people post random idiotic stuff about Steve Jobs. Post that on Android fan boy sites…lol.

  5. Benjamin (@NSbenjamins) - 10 years ago

    everybody knew Google was working on a blackberry clone.

  6. Steve Jobs was a great visionary of his time. But he didn’t grasp the idea that everything is to be copied and shared by others. This is what makes mankind propel forward. He thinks Apple and himself invented everything and has the right to own all their intellectual rights. This belief is archaic and anti-human.

    Just look at Apple itself, which one thing is truly 100% Apple. Everything is built on something previously innovated. No big change in its own right is fundamental, it’s always evolutionary and quantitative. Over time, accumulation of minuscule quantitative changes turn into qualitative and revolutionary phenomenons.

    In true Silicon Valley spirit, when your stuff gets copied, just smile and suck it up, innovate something better to stay on top. Not to sue all your competitors and hold everything to yourself.

    • tallestskil - 10 years ago

      >>But he didn’t grasp the idea that everything is to be copied and shared by others.

      Because that “idea” is a piece of Schmidt and not representative of humanity.

      >>This is what makes mankind propel forward.

      Nope.

      >>Just look at Apple itself, which one thing is truly 100% Apple. Everything is built on something previously innovated.

      Get bent, troll.

      • >>This is what makes mankind propel forward.

        > Nope.

        Of course this is what mankind propels forward. Try to prove that this statement is wrong, and you will understand.

        Or, as an alternative, get bent your fucking self.

      • tallestskil - 10 years ago

        >>Theft of ideas is what makes mankind move forward.

        Yeah, no, you made the claim. You back it up.

        You’re nothing but a pathetic “innovate, don’t litigate” troll. No one agrees with you or gives a flying frick what you have to say. Find another website to crap all over.

      • TechPeeve (@TechPeeve) - 10 years ago

        empty comments from a true Apple lemming

      • tallestskil - 10 years ago

        Thanks for refusing to even attempt to refute what I’ve said.

        Pro tip: Get off our website, you worthless slug.

  7. The UI concepts were simply the rip off of iOS – probably it was due to the fact that the board at Apple gave out a lot of sensitive information that was illegally transmitted to Google. Beyond lame advertising Google has run out of ideas. Google thought that Steve Jobs is an idiot and let Google take a free ride (iOS Map, search) with Apple. The days are over.

    Even for searching Apple has much better stuff – eg: Spotlight. Steve Jobs did not want to enter that area, while he could have done a much better search engine that of Google’s. Copy cats can’s stay on top long as there are much better cats out there and moreover Google has a conflict of interest with its smarp hone wing of Motorola. Backlash could be seen anytime soon.

    • Nicholas Vettese - 10 years ago

      This is such a delusional take on this story. Google is light years ahead of anything Apple is doing. Even people I know who are, and have been solid Apple users for years, are looking at Samsung and Nexus products and liking them. When they saw my Nexus 4, and now my Nexus 5, they are amazed at what I can do with it. How much better everything in Android is.

      Apple is now changing their whole lineup to copy Google and Samsung. New iPhone 5c, bigger screens, coming in iPhone 6 (rumors) even bigger screens. When Google came out with the Nexus 7, Apple released the iPad Mini.

      Please, Apple is now chasing the tail of Google and Samsung everywhere.

  8. Bill Kroll - 10 years ago

    The only thing Google/Rubin should get any credit for is the greatest heist in tech history.

  9. TechPeeve (@TechPeeve) - 10 years ago

    One arrogant f**k to another, pot calling the kettle black for sure. I am sure the Apple phans will say Jobs was justifiable arrogant f**k. SHEEP

  10. Mike Kaylor - 9 years ago

    Steve was one of a kind, and the Google guys wanted to be like Steve. Too bad they just aren’t there and never will be. Steve was exactly right about Rubin and the rest of them, the hell with Google!