In the 1994 interview clip below where he discusses the Macintosh, Steve Jobs quotes the line from Picasso where he says "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Jobs then goes on to say, that "we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

As I said in a previous post about Jobs being one of the great leaders of our time, virtually none of the great products of his career were done first by Apple or Pixar or Next. Jobs just applied his sense of style to edit and refine.

Apparently Jobs only believed that permission to steal ideas applied to him. In a widely reported quote from the authorized Walter Isaacson biography that will be released on Monday, Jobs lays into Android

"“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.”

The iPhone is a great product but it's not perfect and Jobs attitude toward Android is deplorable. We can only hope that Tim Cook sees the stupidity in this approach and finally backs down on this ridiculous patent war.

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