After Steve Jobs tackled the thorny question of the iPhone 4.0 leak at the D: All Things D conference in the early hours, he was back on two of his biggest bug bear topics – Google and Flash. The Apple boss tackled the growing competition with Google, reiterated his problems with Flash and curiously managed to get round to the topic of his sex life. Read on for all the killer soundbites and that slightly disturbing revelation…
Walt Mossberg asked Steve Jobs if Eric Schmidt, then still on Apple’s board, had told him about Android. The answer was a curt: “No.” Mossberg then went on to press him about whether he felt betrayed by the Google CEO and asked: “What’s your relationship like?” But Steve Jobs swerved the question saying: “My sex life is pretty good these days. How’s yours?”
On the issue of competition with Google, Steve Jobs said: “They decided to compete with us. We didn’t go into the search business.” He denied that Apple’s acquisiton of the Siri is about creating a search engine and said it had nabbed the firm for its artificial intelligence smarts: “We have no plans to go into the search business. We don’t care about it – other people do it well.”
After noting that the Google Chrome and the Chrome OS use WebKit tech developed in part by Apple, Steve Jobs said that there are no plans to remove Google iPhone integration.
The vexed question of iPad Flash support also got more airtime. Steve Jobs once again explained: “We just made a tech decision. We aren’t going to make an effort to put this on our platform.” He claimed: “We weren’t trying to have fight, we just decided not to use one of their products. They made a big deal of it.”
He also explained why he wrote his Flash open letter: “I said enough is enough, we’re tired of these guys trashing us.” Don’t expect Apple’s fights with Google and Adobe to end any time soon. The torrent of Flash-packing Android and Google Chrome OS tablets on the horizon will see to that.
Let us know: do you think Steve Jobs is right to hate Flash so passionately? And which do you think will ultimately come out top, Android or iPhone OS?
