CEOs

Steve Jobs Beats Up on Android

Hints at major acquisitions for Apple.

Steve Jobs took Apple’s announcement of a 70 percent surge in quarterly profits to beat up on Google. He said the debate about Google’s “open” system versus Apple’s “closed” was a “smokescreen”; “Open systems don’t always win,” he said, and he added that Google’s mobile operating system is “very very fragmented” over many handset models and app stores. He also said that Apple would not spend any of its $51 billion in cash on dividends or stock buybacks, because the company was positioned to take advantage of some “very strategic opportunities.” Peter Kafka wonders: a videogame studio or Facebook? Meanwhile, The Financial Times throws a little bit of water on all the Apple hype, noting that the 4.2 million iPads that the company sold are below the 5 million it had projected.