Andy Rubin, photo by Yoichiro Akiyama (Tokyo, Japan)

Summary: Andy Rubin (above) and Iain Dodsworth, the founder of TweetDeck, respond to lies told by Steve Jobs, whose products no longer sell well because of competition from Linux-powered devices

Steve Jobs, the control freak who is suing to prevent companies from selling Linux, is becoming no better than the other Steve (Ballmer, not Wozniak). He is spreading FUD about the competition, which is a loser's strategy when you're a CEO. Yes, Jobs is speaking badly about Android and he only gets backlash for it.

Jobs has reasons to be afraid of GNU/Linux. It does more than Apple's operating system, it runs on more hardware, and it is a lot more affordable. PC Pro currently runs the article "Why I prefer Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition to the iPad" and it's a reminder of the fact that hypePad may have catching up to do as less than 0.1% of the world's people have one and it is far too limiting. Syanide says:

4.2 million people. They expected even more. I doubt any figures for Android tablets even exist.

Android is sold by many companies and they can fork it, too. hypePad is a one-company thing, it's a monopoly.

Here is what PC Pro thinks of the hypePad;

I should admit that I come to the iPad pre-irritated by Apple’s attempts to swaddle the thing in a wholly unearned sense of awe. A “magical, revolutionary device”? Please: the telephone was a revolutionary device. It’s like when some 20-year old would-be Apprentice declares “I am the best manager you’ll ever meet”: I want to smack him twice, once for the arrogance and again for the delusion.

Jobs is speaking negatively about Android right now. He knows that few people (a niche of hardcore clients) would be willing to pay a lot more for just a brand name on a tablet that will always have even more restrictions. As the Financial Times puts it, "Apple iPad sales fail to hit forecasts" and it oughtn't surprise.

Sales of Apple’s iPad have failed to meet the steadily rising expectations for the touchscreen tablet device, letting some of the air out of the enthusiasm that has built on Wall Street in recent weeks.

Apple’s shares slipped more than 6 per cent in after-hours trading after it said it had sold 4.2m of the devices in the three months to the end of September, below the 5m that some had €­projected. It sold 3.3m after being introduced part of the way through the prior quarter.

As we pointed out yesterday, Jobs has started a FUD attack on Android and Google has responded politely to show that he was lying.

If you haven't heard by now, Steve Jobs pretty much lost his sh-- (shut yo mouth!) yesterday during Apple's earnings call -- going way above and beyond his usual diatribe over Google and Android. To say it's entertaining is pretty much the understatement of the year. And what's more -- these were prepared remarks. Somebody thought about this for a bit.

Jobs calls stock Android "a commodity" and invents the "Twitterdeck" Twitter client to rail against all of the different handsets developers must contend with. (Of course he meant Tweetdeck -- only one of the more popular Twitter clients out there.)

[...]

Anyhoo, Android's Andy Rubin fired up Twitter this morning to post his first Tweet, which you see above. Pretty much speaks for itself.

Our take? It's telling how much time Jobs spent on his competitors in the earnings call. Best way to downplay the competition is to dismiss it. No longer. And in the process, Jobs is coming off more a loon and less a sage. Listen for yourself after the break.

Jobs not only lied about Android. In the process, he also lied about application developers for Android and TweetDeck's CEO, for example, responds quite strongly according to Engadget and Business Insider which says:

This morning, Iain Dodsworth, founder of TweetDeck, responded to Jobs with a tweet: "Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr nope, no we didn't. It wasn't."

If you look at the original TweetDeck post about all the Android handsets, and Android OSes out there, you can see the company is impressed by it all, not annoyed: "From our perspective it's pretty cool to have our app work on such a wide variety of devices and Android OS variations."

Business Insider has a video of "Steve Jobs's Epic 5-Minute Anti-Google Rant":

In a surprise, Steve Jobs joined Apple's Q3 earnings call today.

Here is the video as ogg. It ought to remind people that Apple is hostile and harmful to GNU/Linux. It's just spreading FUD and suing. ⬆

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Original photo by Matt Buchanan; edited by Techrights