It seems every time I read the news recently I hear more coming out of Apple, Steve Jobs is beginning to sound more like Stevo from the jackass series, specifically that is not very intelligent thing to do with computing and business relationships. Perhaps he to isolated in his iHome and egotistical to realize how many of the things he is saying could come back to doom him and his company. Perhaps he does not care. Whatever the case may be he is quite likely to one day regret it.

Case in point. On Jan 30th Stevo was quoted by wired.com as saying "We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars." Case in point, google bought the android company years before the iPhone happened. Also of note, Jobs when and pissed off Cisco by using the iPhone name which Cisco owned because of their purchase of Infogear back before 2000.

Ok, probably not the smartest move one could make, luckily Stevo was not dealing with Larry Ellison or One Infinite Loop in Cupertino might be one smoking cinder instead of Apple's Headquarters.

Sadly Stevo feels compelled to bust out on Adobe next. Now Google is an incredibly interesting company from my perspective. Which I have never heard anybody address in the press, granted I see the world through a very different lense than everyone else. Adobe I know less about but they have a few apps out that have caused an incredible number of Apples to be sold. One would have to wonder if Adobe finally decided to port Photoshop and the whole CS5 (CreativeSuite 5) to Linux how that would affect Apple. Doubtful Adobe would lose a dime, Hell I would buy a copy just to support their effort but millions more would switch from windows to Linux once Photoshop was available and I would bet Apple would feel more than a disturbance in the force if this was to come to pass.

Microsoft might not know they lost any customers but Apple undoubtedly would feel it first. Adobe would profit and Linux would take a bump up in the numbers so to speak.

While that would take some time to go from drawing board to store shelf there is something that could happen very fast.

Google. ...Where to begin... And better yet, how could one hope to stop them if they chose to.

First off let me state what I have never heard anyone else address and why as powerful and brilliant as they are I feel nobody really understands just how disruptive they could be and they are being totally underestimated.

Corporate Culture, everyone hears google and many talk about the great food and all the perks the employee's get but what does that do to affect the company and their value? Sure costs a pretty penny to take care of that many people. Its all about the law of reciprocity. Google is very giving and a major part of the Corporate Culture there is what nobody has properly addressed before and why i think they are seriously underestimated by everyone, even though their stock today is trading at 555.04 per share.

20% of every engineers work hours are spent on a project of their choice. that means every one of these employee's is spending 20% of their work schedule a month on something that could turn into another revenue stream for Google. Multiply that times the number of employee's they have and your talking about a serious number of man hours. According to http://blogoscoped.com/employees/ as of Jan 2009 it was 20,222.

That is an incredible amount of manhours that could end up spawning countless revenue streams for the company. That I know of, nobody else in the industry can say that. Sure they have problems too, after all its made up of people, and we all have our flaws. Most of us just don't put ours out over the wire as Stevo has chosen to do.

But google also has a decent track record of creating code and giving it away. Imagine what would happen if google decided to take a internal vote from its employee's who are using Linux and task them to take 10% of their hours and spend it specifically on the Desktop, Toolset and Integration coding and the GUI polish?

Give Linux a bit of a "wash, wax and detail" so to speak but just on a surface and touchy bits of the Linux Desktops. That coupled with Adobe embracing Linux???

This would over the short term be almost hard to see happening and its effects on day one would be hard to even notice, but in the long term it would be the pivotal event that ignites the potential of the disruptive force behind the concept of Open Source Software. This would be like a tsunami that never ends and have the potential to cause a wholesale tetonic shift in the market, one away from Apple and Microsoft and potentially drive masses/hordes of new users directly onto the Linux desktop.

And most importantly All of this is without even talking about what is happening with Android. In case you have been hibernating, Froyo aka 2.2 is VERY FAST!! and its moved android beyond where IOS4 is today, Sure every year or so Apple pops out another iPhone but Android is popping out new devices with different hardware configurations every few weeks, all year long!

Now we even have a new project out there called the "Android Scripting Engine" that might release a flood of new developers directly into the hands of the Android Market. Don't like programming in Java, fine, select your scripting engine of choice and write for android with ASE, prefer perl, or python or php...

Nobody is going to tell you you can not do it that way as long as your writing secure, clean code with functionality everyone wants. 2 years down the road, iPhone might be more of a iCould have been than a iWas. All its gonna take is for someone to write a scripting engine for apple code to android and its all iOver. So my Words to Stevo, better think long before speaking. I would also recommend using both ears and ALL the grey bits in the middle, before you use that one mouth. You may have much if not everything to lose.