Googlers Fire Back at Steve Jobs 'Bullshit' Jab
If Steve Jobs keeps this up, he may yet set off the biggest corporate flamefest in Silicon Valley: Googlers past and present are pushing back against the Apple CEO's trashing of their corporate motto.
Capping months of mounting tension between former allies Google and Apple over competing phones, Jobs called Google's "Don't Be Evil" mantra either "bullshit" or "crap" over the weekend. Now the Googler Diaspora is letting him have it in this FriendFeed thread. "I don't know where people get the idea that competition is evil," writes Paul Buchheit, the ex-Googler who invented "Don't Be Evil," along with Gmail and FriendFeed. One current Googler says he plans to tack up Jobs' "very motivational" quote beside his monitor; another says Jobs myopically "sees all competition as zero-sum." And former Googler Kevin Fox says Apple is worse, "holding Google's iPhone apps in limbo because Apple is afraid they might succeed." Your turn, Apple guys.
(Pic Jobs, center, with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, left, and co-founder Sergey Brin, right, at Macworld, Jan. 2008. Getty Images.)