Larry Page isn’t such a bad guy. Y’all may have this image of Larry as a guy who helped another neckbeard steal slavishly from Apple’s iOS in an attempt to further their ad monopoly, but that’s not how Steve Jobs felt. Just ask Larry!

That’s the gist of how Page feels, as revealed in his Businessweek interview. According to Page, Steve and he may not have been BFFs, but their relationship was far from the acrimonious dynamic that people like biographer Walter Isaacson have painted.

Page offers a different version of those events. He says that Jobs reached out to him, not the other way around, and that when they met, in the last months of Jobs’s life, the Apple founder offered useful insights into how to run a company.

Insights that Page ignored.

Page believes that Jobs’s fury toward Google was not entirely genuine and was “actually for show.” Asked to explain, he suggests that Jobs’s apparent rage about Android was merely meant to motivate Apple employees.

That Steve – such a kidder! Never mind that Jobs’s early career was defined by actions almost identical to what Google pulled with Android. The man with arguably the best professional and personal overview of Jobs’s last years says as much. Everyone else thinks that Jobs was an intensely emotional man that took personally every affront to the innovations of his company, but really it was just a crank used to jack up employee morale! Totally reinventing the past must help Page sleep better at night. But Larry doesn’t subscribe to that faux-outrage at competition school of charlatanism at Google.

“For a lot of companies, it’s useful for them to really feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that. I personally believe it’s better to shoot higher. You don’t want to be looking at your competitors.”

Without the ideas that Android lifted wholesale from Apple, the only view Apple would have of Google as a competitor would be that of an almost imperceptible dot in their rearview mirror. Try comparing a list of Apple’s products and Google’s products and judging them in terms of success if you want a good laugh. Google’s list does turn over every three months when the company axes services it optimistically fluffed at their launch. Services like Google Wave, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Notebook, Coupons, Answers…the list of cancelled projects is longer than the list of services they support. Google is a company that uses its invisible money-making ad machine to power the whims of out-of-touch engineers before the market for these products laughs them out of existence.

Don’t confuse the kindness of a man seeking closure in his life for forgiveness or permission, Larry. Steve Jobs hated Android and thought Google – particularly Eric Schmidt – betrayed his trust by jacking the iPhone to launch your knock-off shartphone platform. He certainly didn’t care for you very much either. If you think differently, you’re remembering it wrong.

Sweet dreams.