A few years ago, Apple (AAPL)’s late CEO Steve Jobs swore to destroy Google’s Android mobile operating system in his anger over what he saw as a direct copying of Apple’s ideas in Android smartphones launched early in 2010. “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs told his official biographer during a 2010 interview. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
During a recent interview with Wired, Google (GOOG) CEO and co-founder Larry Page was asked how he felt about Steve Jobs’s infamous comments on Google’s Android OS. His answer? A question: “How well is that working?”
Obviously, Page didn’t expand on his response, because he didn’t have to. Android is now the most-used smartphone platform worldwide, and its popularity and massive lead in market share is answer enough.
When asked whether he though that “Android’s huge lead in market share is decisive” in the patent battle Apple is waging against Google, which aims to either limit the growth of Google’s Android mobile OS or to restrict the number of iPhone-like features that it offers, Page only responded that “Android has been very successful, and we’re very excited about it.”
Speaking on the topic of Google X, which is a secretive lab within Google’s Mountain View, Calif.- headquarters that experiments with ambitious future projects like a space elevator or a driverless car, Page said its purpose is to develop breakthrough products that could develop more independently. He then compared Google’s endeavors to Apple:
[via Wired]“You know, we always have these debates: We have all this money, we have all these people, why aren’t we doing more stuff? You may say that Apple only does a very, very small number of things, and that’s working pretty well for them. But I find that unsatisfying. I feel like there are all these opportunities in the world to use technology to make people’s lives better. At Google we’re attacking maybe 0.1 percent of that space. And all the tech companies combined are only at like 1 percent. That means there’s 99 percent virgin territory. Investors always worry, “Oh, you guys are going to spend too much money on these crazy things.” But those are now the things they’re most excited about—YouTube, Chrome, Android. If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things.”You can read the full details of the Larry Page interview over at Wired.
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