He is disputing Jobs' claim that their relationship soured because Google decided to compete with Apple..
Nice rewriting of the quote. He's actually disputing the fact that Android "followed" Apple by saying that the Android came first (which is correct in fact, but not in spirit—the Android of then was no different than Windows Mobile, Blackberry, SymbianOS, or PalmOS).
A lot of evidence (phone prototypes, state of the market, the Android platform itself pre-iPhone) points to the fact that Android was targeted toward the business market with a candybar styled phone and touchboard (which were common then and conventional wisdom said that touchscreen keyboards would not work, hence the reason the P900 came with one and the LG phone still used triple tap for input). My guess is Jobs felt that Google and Apple would split the phone market first (business and consumer) before heading to compete with each other. This is why he probably ignored the significance of the Android purchase. The same can be said of Quicktime and the On2 purchase (one which Google is going to lose because they’re really facing off against a giant patent consortium, where Apple is just a minority member).
The issue here is Jobs is just too good of a salesman and ends up selling his future competitors on his ideas. He did the same with the GUI on the Macintosh (sure GUI's came from Xerox, but who do you think
sold Gates on the GUI future before the release of the Macintosh? Xerox or Apple). Same goes to selling Disney on the future of 3D animation, almost to disaster (the full terms of the Pixar deal were looking very onerous just before Disney purchased the company). Those two examples are good indicators of Jobs salesmanship as neither ideas were Jobs’s, nor even close—Pixar was a Lucas company before Jobs purchased it during a bitter divorce and the Macintosh team was a Sibera that Sculley tried to send Jobs to.
(For all we know, he also sold Pixar‘s #1 competitor on the idea too as Katzenberg was studio chairman who brokered the first two Disney-Pixar deals before joining with Spielberg and Geffen to create Dreamworks SKG—and it’s clear which of the three were responsible for Dreamworks Animation Studio. There is little doubt that somehow Pixar’s projects were leaking to Katzenberg (then at) Disney—Antz/Bugs Life? Shark Tale/Nemo? Remember the story ideas for Toy Story 2, A Bugs Life, Monster’s Inc., Finding Nemo, and Wall-E were sketched out after the release of Toy Story and were probably used in the pitch for the second deal.)
How do we know that Jobs sold Schmidt on the touch-based operating system before the announcement of the iPhone? Well we don’t. But given the distance between
Android and
WebOS announcements in a business where it was 100% of Palm's business but incidental to Google’s (after all, they just power the search and don't make money off the platform at all), we can deduce that the iPhone development and Job’s personal relationship with Eric Schmidt had a substatial impact on the Google Android platform.
Still, there is nothing untoward or illegal about this—it is as much an error on Jobs part as an opportunity for Schmidt. If anything it probably says that Eric Schmidt is a much smarter businessman than we give him credit for (or Steve Jobs did, for that matter)—certainly he is no John Sculley.
