Steve Jobs famously vowed to spend his dying breath
and all of Apple’s cash to destroy Google’s Android operating system. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Google CEO Larry Page said that despite Jobs’s rather public hatred, “the Android differences were actually for show.” Page claimed that, “For a lot of companies, it’s useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that. I personally believe that it’s better to shoot higher. You don’t want to be looking at your competitors. You want to be looking at what’s possible and how to make the world better.” The CEO shot down rumors that the two were bitter rivals, instead noting that “I had a relationship with Steve.” Despite Jobs’s ailing health at the time, Apple’s co-founder reached out to Page for a casual talk. “He was quite sick. I took it as an honor that he wanted to spend some time with me,” Page said. “I figured he wanted to spend time with his family at that point. He had a lot of interesting insights about how to run a company and that was pretty much what we discussed.”
