Apple helped create and then took full advantage of all the hype. On launch day it sent top executives to various stores in big cities to witness it all and help whip up the crowds. Head of Global Marketing Phil Schiller went to Chicago. Jony Ive and his design crew went to San Francisco.
Steve Jobs’s store was, naturally, the one in downtown Palo Alto at the corner of University Avenue and Kipling Street. It was a mile and a half from his house and he often showed up there unannounced when he was in town. The appropriate high-tech luminaries had already gathered when he arrived. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and early Apple employees Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld were already standing on line. But it also seemed as if Jobs had some internal flames to fan of his own, said one of the engineers who was there along with Grignon and many others who had worked on the project, including Fadell and Forstall. “So there’s this reunion of the original Mac guys, and it’s really cool. And then Steve goes up to Tony [Fadell] and proceeds to go over in a corner of the store and talk to him for an hour and ignore Forstall just to fuck with him.”
“Up until that day, for the previous six months, everything had been Tony’s fault. Any hardware problems or ship delays or manufacturing problems—all Tony’s fault. Scott could do no wrong. But that was the day the press reviews came out, and the iPhone’s email [software] wasn’t working for people, but everyone loved the hardware. So now Scott was the bad boy, and Tony was the golden boy. And it was funny, because Steve did it in a way in which his back was to Forstall so that Tony got to look at Scott while it was all happening. I’m not joking. The look on Scott’s face was incredible. It was like his daddy told him he didn’t love him anymore.”
4
I Thought We Were Friends
Back at Google, the Android team’s initial worries about the commitment to the project were proving unfounded. Rubin got permission to hire dozens more engineers in 2007 and, if anything, found senior management paying too much attention to him. During presentations with Schmidt, Brin, and Page, they leaned on him hard for not getting Android up and running fast enough. They threw out ideas at a frenetic pace and were unyielding when they didn’t like what they saw. Notes from one meeting in July 2007 included Schmidt’s declaring that there weren’t enough people at Google writing software for Android and that that needed to change “ASAP.” It also included admonitions from Page, who said that Android needed to get faster and easier to use, and from Brin, who was concerned that the software needed to better accommodate power users who might store more than ten thousand contacts.
Page was particularly specific. All screens needed to load in less than two hundred milliseconds, he said, and the Android needed to be user-friendly enough so that anyone could navigate the phone with one hand while driving. In another meeting Schmidt, unhappy with the operation or design of the slide-out keyboard planned for the Dream phone, said to one of the Android product managers, “First impressions really matter here. Don’t fuck it up.”
But at the same time, Google showed zero sign of backing away from its relationship with Apple and the iPhone. Rubin and the Android team may have felt competitive with Jobs and Apple from the moment the iPhone was announced, but Google’s ruling triumvirate didn’t feel that way at all. After the iPhone was available for sale June 29, Brin and Page were never without one, and in Android meetings they often critically compared those features planned for the Android with the iPhone’s features. DeSalvo said he remembers a number of meetings in which “one of them would ask, ‘Why are we even doing this project? I have a phone. It’s got Google services. It does Gmail. It does Calendar. Why do I need this Android thing?’ It used to really piss me off.”
Brin and Page won’t discuss the thinking behind their remarks, but Schmidt will. He says Google was absolutely two-faced about the iPhone and Android back then, and for good reasons: Google desperately needed to get Google search and its other applications on mobile phones. It had been trying and failing for years. And the iPhone and the Android, while promising, were new enough that choosing one over the other seemed foolish.
In 2007 Google and Apple didn’t even seem to be in the same business. Google made money from search ads. Apple made it on selling devices. “It was not obvious to us in 2006, 2007, and 2008 that it would be a two-horse race between Apple and Google,” Schmidt said. “These are network platforms, and it is traditional that you end up with a couple [of dominant companies] as opposed to ten [companies]. But it was not obvious back then who would be the winners. Symbian was still quite strong from Nokia [then the largest phone maker in the world]. Windows Mobile had some level of traction. And, of course, BlackBerry was quite strong [with a lock on almost every corporation in the world].”
So, while Brin, Page, and Schmidt were pushing the Android team hard, they were also beefing up the Google iPhone team. Most notably, they put Vic Gundotra, a newly hired but well-known executive from Microsoft, in charge of running it. Gundotra, who was thirty-seven, had spent his entire career working for Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, becoming their point person for the company’s relationship with all external Windows software developers—tens of thousands of geeks worldwide. Gundotra was well-known for his technical acumen, his near-Steve-Jobs-quality presentations, and his willingness to take risks and be controversial. Microsoft’s incredible growth and dominance during the 1990s was in no small part the result of his tireless evangelism, convincing legions of programmers worldwide to write software for Windows when few thought it would succeed. It was such a coup for Google to hire Gundotra that even when Microsoft said it would enforce his one-year noncompete agreement—a rare step—Google hired him anyway. Google just paid him not to work for a year, until the end of June 2007.
Gundotra’s 2007 start date at Google has been compared to a “tornado whipping through a Midwestern town.” He put executives on the spot in management meetings, asking questions about their businesses’ profitability. When outlandish ideas were proposed, he asked whether their promoters had drawn up business plans. These are normal questions at most companies. At Google, which prided itself on making a product popular before making it profitable, they could get you fired.
But Gundotra thrived, and he quickly made Google’s success in mobile not just a business imperative but a cause. He went to conferences and talked about how he carried and used more than a dozen phones; why Google was going to be on every mobile platform; and how, as he liked to put it, “we’ve seen this movie before. The exact same dynamic that happened on the PC will happen on mobile phones.” The difference this time, he said, was that Google and Apple were on the right side and Microsoft was on the wrong side of that evolution. He’d been thinking about the future of mobile since 2005 when his young daughter suggested he use his phone to find answers to questions instead of saying, “I don’t know.” He’d ended up at Google because he couldn’t convince Microsoft to listen to his ideas.
What made Gundotra such a disruptive force at Google was that he quickly realized Google’s future in mobile depended almost exclusively on the iPhone. He was supposed to figure out a way to get Google’s applications on all mobile platforms. But he quickly realized that that was a waste of time—that the iPhone was such a revolutionary device that it would soon catapult it and all other Apple devices to the top of the heap. Not only would the iPhone rocket Apple past other mobile phone makers such as Nokia and RIM, makers of the BlackBerry, it would signal the end of Microsoft’s dominance—with Windows and Office—of desktop computing too. “You could see it. It was a game changer. No one had done anything like it,” he said.
For Gundotra, the list of things that made the iPhone revolutionary was endless: The iPhone was beautiful. Apple was free to control it without dreaded carrier intervention. It was the first device powerful enough to run Google’s applications the same way they ran on a desktop. And it had a full Internet browser that allowed Google’s search ads to appear and work normally. This was great for Google because it would help its applic
ations and search ads become even more ubiquitous. It was also great for Google because, as Gundotra had predicted, it was terrible for Microsoft. Microsoft’s power stemmed from its Windows and Office monopoly on desktop and laptop computers. It had little power on mobile phones. Despite Schmidt’s fears about Windows’ traction on mobile phones, Gundotra believed the iPhone was such a leap forward, Windows’ progress would come to a crashing halt. He thought the initial high price of the iPhone was a red herring. Apple would drop the price if consumers resisted.
All of this seemed obvious to Gundotra in the fall of 2007, but it was not to many other Googlers. “People thought it was crazy,” Gundotra said. “Smartphones were a tiny percentage of the mobile business back then [2 percent], so I was accused of believing in the Apple hype. ‘If you think people in India and China are ever going to be able to afford a phone that is seven hundred dollars [$499 for the cheapest model], you’re smoking dope,’ they said.” While he had the support of Schmidt, Brin, and Page, many thought he was challenging a foundational tenet of Google’s culture—that it was a company that played nice with everyone. Google’s success on desktop computers depended on its getting search and other applications to run on all software platforms—OS X, Windows, Linux—and all Internet browsers. Getting behind one partner to the exclusion of others was not the way to do that. “I softened the blow a little bit by saying we were shutting down development on all but five smartphones. But it was a very controversial decision. Culturally at Google it was unthinkable that you would not build for every BlackBerry or Windows Mobile phone. Engineers in European Google offices were very angry we wouldn’t support various Nokia phones. People had a hard time seeing [that smartphones would become so important], especially the iPhone. People on my staff quit. It was brutal. While [Microsoft CEO Steve] Ballmer was famous for saying that [the iPhone would fail] publicly, everyone believed that. They just thought it was going to go away.”
* * *
The Android team was particularly troubled by Gundotra’s emergence. Its members had not only kept a low profile at Google since the company’s purchase in 2005, they’d successfully kept most of Google from even knowing about their project. Now, with Gundotra pushing Google’s mobile agenda much harder, with the iPhone actually available for sale and with early prototypes of their own touchscreen phone—the Dream—now visible in the office, they were going to have to acknowledge and defend what they were doing long before they felt ready to do so. If forced into choosing between Gundotra’s iPhone apps and Android in 2007, it seemed obvious that Schmidt, Brin, and Page would choose the iPhone. The Android was more than a year from even being a product. “That’s when it all [the tension between the two projects] became real,” a former member of the Android team told me. “That’s when they [Android] started to test-drive phones and talk to T-Mobile about how much they were going to spend on marketing. That’s when you started to see that this thing [Android] was going to get bigger and bigger as it went along.”
Up until then Android had been like Google’s mistress—lavished with attention and gifts but still hidden away. This secrecy wasn’t Schmidt’s, Page’s, or Brin’s idea. It was Andy Rubin’s. Rubin didn’t want anyone to know about his project. Like most entrepreneurs, he’s a control freak, and he believed that the only way he could succeed with Android was to run the operation as a stealth start-up inside Google. Google was only nine years old then, but for Rubin, the company was already too slow and bureaucratic. Ethan Beard says he remembers that the (non-Android) part of Google had just spent nine to twelve months negotiating one agreement with Motorola—and it was merely a framework for future discussions. “So Andy just tried to do his best to insulate Android from any of that [frustrating bureaucracy]. They didn’t interact with anyone else. They were completely separate.” Schmidt, Brin, and Page even let Rubin build a café inside the Android headquarters on the Google campus that for a while was open only to Android employees.
The idea of a division inside Google that few even knew about was antithetical to its culture. What made Google different from other corporations was that it avoided silos—separate divisions that didn’t interact—at all costs. Schmidt, Brin, and Page had set up the company to actively encourage information sharing. Any engineer could find out what other engineers were working on and even look at the software code with a few clicks of a mouse. Before Google went public—and became subject to SEC rules—Schmidt, Brin, and Page even shared details about Google’s revenues and profits in companywide meetings in front of more than a thousand employees.
Rubin respected Google’s unique approach. But he also understood that if other companies knew what he was working on, they might beat him to the marketplace. “There were plenty of pissed-off Googlers who said we’re not Googley because we’re not sharing,” a former top Android engineer told me. “We had to turn down some very senior people who wanted to see our source code, and Andy had to be the bad guy. So there was a lot of tension.”
Rubin wasn’t just driven by his need to make sure Android moved fast. He knew that producing software for smartphones was vastly different from producing software for the web, which was Google’s primary business. In Google’s web-software world, all products are free and no product is ever truly finished. Juxtaposed against the tyranny of Microsoft and the packaged-software industry in general, this was a truly innovative philosophy. Google would get a product to about 80 percent finished, release it to users, and let their feedback guide the remaining 20 percent of development. Because the software was free, users’ expectations were not as high. And because the software was on the web, the refining could be done almost in real time. There was no longer any need to wait a year until the next release went to stores, which was the way most software was still sold back then.
Rubin knew the cell phone industry viewed Google’s approach to deadlines with horror. When you make and sell physical things such as cell phones, products that aren’t finished in time for the holiday shopping season are catastrophes that waste hundreds of millions in carrier marketing costs, and manufacturer development costs. “I remember some times where Andy would say, ‘We need to get this done by this date,’ and a part of the engineering team would say, ‘We can’t get that done by then,’ and Andy would say, ‘If you can’t get it done, I’ll fire you guys and hire a new team that can do it,’” said another former Android engineer.
At most companies such a hierarchical, even militaristic approach to getting things done would be considered conventional. At Google it was so distinctive that it made the Android team feel as if they were revolutionaries. After the iPhone shock wore off and the Android team saw all the things the iPhone didn’t do, its members truly believed that what they were building would be superior in every way, and that they didn’t even need Google to pull it off. “I basically thought there was no way the iPhone could compete with us,” said Bob Lee, a top Android engineer at the time. “I thought Android was going to turn into Windows [because of its vast distribution across many phones] with a ninety-eight percent market share, and that the iPhone would ultimately end up with just two percent market share.”
Rubin encouraged this feeling every chance he got by passing along the perks of his executive-level job to his staff. He was always buying the latest gadgets—cameras, audio equipment, gaming systems, and other electronics—to keep abreast of the latest thinking in his industry. But he rarely kept his purchases long. When he was done, he’d just put them outside his office and send an email to his staff, offering them on a first-come-first-serve basis. Often it was the latest high-end camera or stereo system, worth thousands of dollars. If many on his staff had to be at a conference—say, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas—he would charter a jet so they could easily get there and back. One year, after Google released the Dream—known by then as the T-Mobile G1—Rubin boosted the Android’s team year-end Google bonus with money out of his own pocket. One engineer said it doubled his year-end bonus.
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sp; The downside to all this separateness, however, was that it didn’t endear Android to the Google rank and file any more than Gundotra had with his decision to throw Google’s weight behind the iPhone. As much as the Android team felt as if they could do everything themselves, they couldn’t; and when they needed to work with Googlers on the other side of the wall they’d built, their requests were rarely received warmly. “We’d be like, ‘Hey, we’re doing a phone. Surprise! And we need Gmail on it. Can you help us?’” DeSalvo said. “And they’d be like, ‘Well, we have a two-year software road map and you’re not on it, so, no, we can’t help you.’ So initially we had to use the web API [the connection the public uses] rather than a dedicated API [which would be faster and more reliable]. And it was the same thing for Google Talk, Calendar, and all this other stuff. It was just one nightmare after another, just trying to get basic things done, because no one knew that they needed to support us.”
It wasn’t just the lack of give-and-take between Android and the rest of Google that chilled relations. It was that Rubin’s entire effort at information control wasn’t working well. Every month in 2007 it seemed there was another rumor that Google was building a phone. Googlers were used to being able to keep their products secret because they were typically developed entirely in-house. While Google management shared more than most companies did with their employees, remarkably little of that information leaked. To build Android, however, Rubin needed to work with a myriad of external suppliers and manufacturers. Googlers couldn’t see Android’s code, but some of Android’s external partners could—and some were clearly talking.
Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution Page 9