Back in the early days of Apple they have major cash problems and tended to spend more on building hardware than they could reasonably sell it for. This became a huge issue and if fate (and Microsoft) had not intervened Apple might never have made it as far as they have. It was during this time that Steve Jobs returned and took back the company as its CEO.

Steve Jobs had a knack for taking something that already existed and making it seem better (in some cases it actually was better). However, not matter what his visionary genius for finding the “hook” in a product or technology he also needed someone to find ways to build it at the lowest cost. This is where Tim Cook came in. Cook might have also been there to help reign in some of the rants that Steve Jobs was famous for including some of his more publicized comments on Android and Flash.

Now some of those comments might be used against Apple in an upcoming legal dispute with Motorola/Google. You see, what Google’s lawyers are trying to do is something we have talked about before; establishing the corporate personality. This is a term used to identify the traits, tendencies and even tactics that are used by corporations based in the control of their leaders. It is not hard to do really and often takes publicly made comments, actions etc. of a company’s senior leadership into account (as they tend to get what they want).

What Google is trying to show is that Apple’s continual attacks on Android devices has nothing to do with protecting intellectual property, but is a reaction to what Steve Jobs felt and wanted. He despised Android and felt that it was a rip-off of iOS despite the fact that Android, Inc was in existence for two years before the first iPhone was released. Android, Inc was founded in 2003 and bought by Google in 2005. The first beta and SDK was released in Late 2007. To call it a rip-off ignores many facts…

Still Jobs was convinced of this and, as with his war against Adobe and Flash made it one of his priorities. According to a quote in his Authorized Biography (written by Walter Isaacson) Jobs stated “Our lawsuit is saying, 'Google, you f**king ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.' Grand theft. I'm willing to go to thermonuclear war on this.”

Many feel that this meant Jobs was willing to do whatever it took to remove the competition (Android) from the market and there is some evidence to this as there have been multiple lawsuits and requests for bans in multiple countries many based on patents or copyrights of a dubious nature.

Google’s lawyers, in an attempt to show this to the jury and the court, have asked to use that quote and others from the biography to prove that this is what Apple is doing. Apple does not want these quotes used (for obvious reasons), but a judge has ruled that they are admissible in this case. Interestingly though, the judge (Federal Judge Richard Posner) has also barred Apple from asking Jurors to favor Apple if they liked Steve Jobs or Apple products. We wonder if Google will be calling anyone from Adobe to testify that this style of litigation fits into Apple’s corporate personality, if so it could certainly make things very interesting as this case and others move further. After all Steve Jobs had some very inflammatory things to say about Adobe and claimed they were obsolete technology barring Flash from use on the iPhone as a video playback system or as a development system…

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