According to his upcoming official biography, Steve Jobs wanted to eradicate Android at any cost.

“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. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

Jobs used an expletive to describe Android and Google Docs [...] In a subsequent meeting with Schmidt at a Palo Alto [...] Jobs told Schmidt that he wasn’t interested in settling the lawsuit, the book says.

“I don’t want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that’s all I want.” The meeting, Isaacson wrote, resolved nothing.

This, to me, isn’t the attitude of a genius. These words sound like someone who has problems coming to grips with a reality that he feels has dealt him unfair cards. If all CEOs of technology companies would act like this, innovation would cease completely. Jobs himself stood on the shoulder of giants and was not ashamed to admit that, in his words, “good artists copy, great artists steal” but apparently that was only OK as long as his company was doing the stealing.

As someone who switched from an iPhone to Android to escape the unreasonable tyranny of Apple’s app store censorship and erratic iron-fist design decisions, I am happy the man is gone and I hope this hypocrisy and single-mindedness died with him. We need open technologies that enable the user to do what he or she wants, not totalitarian CEOs that think they know what is best for people. The technology business needs more innovation and less dogged determination on destroying the competition.

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According to his upcoming official biography, Steve Jobs wanted to eradicate Android at any cost. “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. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing ...