Hasta La Gadget!

This is starting to get good. It’s days like these that I really enjoy what I do for a living. What started as a surprise appearance by Steve Jobs on last night’s Apple earning’s call has already turned into a full-on three executive pileup. I mean, you didn’t really expect the companies in Jobs’s sights to just sit idly by as he slammed them in front of the press, did you?

To recap, last night Jobs invited himself onto an Apple earnings call to both brag about the company’s numbers and to stick it to the competition. He attacked the perception of Android’s openness by stating,

We find this a bit disingenuous, and clouding the real difference between our two approaches. The first thing that most of think about when we hear the word “open” is Windows, which is available on a variety of devices. Unlike Windows, however, where most PCs have the same user interface and run the same apps, Android is very fragmented.

Google VP Andy Rubin shot back on Twitter, writing,

the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make

Rubin was pointing out just how open the software that his company created really was.