Google’s Larry Page talked with Wired’s Steven Levy in a long conversation that covers everything from the startup culture, to Android, Motorola and more.
Page kicked off the interview with a scathing assessment of technology companies and why the focus on competition causes them to fail. “It’s always about the competition,” Page says. “It’s hard to find actual examples of really amazing things that happened solely due to competition. How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?”
The Google founder talked Android and Apple and launched a zing that likely raised the hackles of many Apple fans. When speaking about competition and rivalries, Wired’s Levy noted that “Steve Jobs felt competitive enough to claim that he was willing to “go to thermonuclear war” on Android,” and Page retorted, “How well did that go?”
Page also talks about Motorola and confirms that Google didn’t buy the company just for its patents. It’s in with Motorola for the long haul.
As we said when we acquired Motorola, we’re running it independently, and Dennis Woodside is in charge. But that’s very much what we want to do with Motorola and what Dennis wants to do. There’s a lot of room for innovation in hardware. The phones we use now have glass that everyone worries will break if they drop the device. Five or 10 years from now, that will be different. There’s going to be a lot of change.
You can read the full interview on Wired’s website.
[Via Wired]