One of my main arguments was that news media has been too slow to aggressively compete with Google and Facebook and now might be a good time to start properly punching and kicking. I made the point with a suitably vicious quote from Steve Jobs. I have seen a succession of bland and cheery epithets apparently authored by Jobs. You’ve seen them. “You hire smart people and then let them get on with it”, “Great things aren’t done by a person, they’re done by a team of people”. That kind of crap. I have no idea if Jobs actually did deliver any of this vanilla flavoured motivational bullshit. If he did, I doubt he was serious. The quotes that best capture the man also capture his rapacious and extremely aggressive hatred of pretty much everyone who competed with Apple. The specific quote I used at the INMA’s conference was from Walter Isaacson’s biography and came from the claim that Google’s Android phone was “stealing” ideas from Apple.

“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40bn in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this”.

I read the quote in full and used it to extol my point that this was how you compete with Google. You go for the throat. The audience response inside the New York Times flagship conference centre was suitably bifurcated. About half the room gave me a clap, the others crossed their legs uncomfortably and wished they had missed this session. Both Google and Facebook were, after all, the two main sponsors of the INMA conference. Oops.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.marketingweek.com