Larry Ellison: We Already Know Apple Without Steve Jobs, Google’s Page Did Something Evil

Oracle founder Larry Ellison praised Steve Jobs, bashed Google co-founder Larry Page and hinted that Apple’s going to fall a long way. Ellison used few words in an interview with Charlie Rose for CBS This Morning, but said quite a lot about mobile operating system leaders Google and Apple.

When Charlie Rose asked Ellison what led to Apple’s success under Steve Jobs besides hard work, Ellison said that Jobs was brilliant and compared him to Thomas Edison and Pablo Picasso. When asked what happens to Apple without Jobs, Ellison said:

Well we already know. We conducted the experiment. It’s been done. We’ve seen Apple with Steve Jobs. We’ve seen Apple without Steve Jobs. Now we’re going to see Apple without Steve Jobs.

Jobs and Ellison were close friends well before Jobs re-built Apple and its product lineup that we know today. As you can see in the video Ellison uses his hands to illustrate the peaks and valleys of Apple’s success to Steve Job’s two tenures as CEO. Apple went from revolutionizing the personal computer industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s under Steve Jobs’ leadership to almost going under in the 1990s. Apple acquired Steve Jobs’ NeXT, which built what would become OS X, in late 1996. Jobs went on to introduce a parade of hits including the iMac, iPod, MacBook, iPhone and iPad. Since Jobs died, Apple’s lost significant smartphone and tablet market share to Google and its Android platform.

Ellison had harsh words for Google co-founder and CEO, who he claims is the only one that makes decisions at Google. Apps for the search giant’s mobile operating system are generally built using Java, a programming language Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems. Ellison says Google is using Java without Oracle’s permission. Ellison challenges Google’s “Don’t be Evil” ethos.

“When you write a program for the Android phone…you use the Oracle Java tools for everything. At the very end you press a button that says convert this to Android format,” Ellison said. “I think what they did was absolutely evil. This really bothers me. I don’t see how he thinks you can just copy somebody else’s stuff.”

Apple’s own board of directors is reportedly concerned with Apple’s pace of innovation since Tim Cook took over as CEO.