The most important sources for this book weren’t officially sanctioned interviews anyway. They were the myriad engineers and executives who actually worked on these projects but have gone on to do other things. All of them were proud of the work they did and graciously spent hours with me making sure I recounted accurately what happened—many on the record. Although Steve Jobs and Google executives such as Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Andy Rubin get all the credit for building the iPhone, the iPad, and everything that has grown out of Google’s Android project, these people are the unseen heroes of Silicon Valley. They felt, as I did, that they were part of history. They didn’t want their work to be forgotten. I felt their stories deserved to be told.
Notes
Introduction
The iPhone has become: Apple financial statements and presentations.
Apple is now the largest: Philip Elmer-DeWitt, “Chart of the Day: Apple as the World’s No. 1 PC Maker,” CNN Money, 2/7/2013; Apple financial statements; Andrea Chang, “Global TV Shipments Fall in 2012, Recovery Not Expected Until 2015,” Los Angeles Times, 4/2/2013; John Sousanis, “World Vehicle Sales Surpass 80 Million in 2012,” WardsAuto, 2/1/2013.
To Apple’s astonishment: Killian Bell, “Android Powers Almost 60% of All Mobile Devices Sold, iOS Just 19.3%,” CultofAndroid.com, 5/10/2013; Jon Fingas, “Apple Counts 400 Million iOS Devices Sold as of June,” Engadget.com, 9/12/2012.
During the third quarter of 2012: Philip Elmer-DeWitt, “Chart of the Day: Apple iPhone vs. Samsung Galaxy Sales,” CNN Money, 3/16/2013.
Apple has even begun replacing: Shira Ovide, “Apple Boots Google for Microsoft in Siri” (Digits blog), Wall Street Journal, 6/10/2013.
Today, 1.8 billion cell phones: “Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Fell in 2012: Gartner,” Reuters, 2/13/2013; Mary Meeker and Liang Wu, “Internet Trends: D11 Conference,” www.kpcb.com/insights/2013-internet-trends, 5/29/2013.
Although most people don’t think: “iTunes Continues to Dominate Music Retailing, but Nearly 60 Percent of iTunes Music Buyers Also Use Pandora,” NPD Group press release, 9/18/2012; “As Digital Video Gets Increasing Attention, DVD and Blu-ray Earn the Lion’s Share of Revenue,” NPD Group press release, 1/30/2013; Colin Dixon, “How Valuable Is Apple to the Movie Business? Not So much!,” NScreenMedia, 4/25/2013; Horace Dediu, “Measuring the iTunes Video Store,” Horace Dediu, ASYMCO.com, 6/19/2013; Brian X. Chen, “Apple and Netflix Dominate Online Video” (Bits blog), New York Times, 6/19/2013.
1. The Moon Mission
But Jobs had no choice: Wikipedia, cross-checked with Apple financial statements; Buster Heine, “15 Years of Macworld History in Just 10 Minutes,” CultofMac.com, 1/29/2013.
It wasn’t just his own: Fred Vogelstein, “The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry,” Wired, 1/9/2008.
Worst of all: Ibid.
Jobs was personally offended: Kara Swisher, “Blast from D Past Video: Apple’s Steve Jobs at D1 in 2003,” AllThingsD.com, 5/3/2010.
It’s hard to imagine: “iPhone,” Wikipedia; cross-checked with Apple financial statements.
Publicly, Jobs continued his: Kara Swisher, “Blast from D Past: Apple’s Steve Jobs at D2 in 2004,” AllThingsD.com, 5/10/2010.
The tension between the partners: Frank Rose, “Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone,” Wired, 11/2005.
Jobs successfully pinned the Rokr screwup: “iPod Sales per Quarter,” Wikipedia; cross-checked with Apple financial statements; Peter Burrows, “Working with Steve Jobs,” Bloomberg Businessweek, 10/12/2011.
Disney, on whose board: “Disney Teams with Sprint to Offer National Wireless Service for Families,” Disney news release, 7/6/2005.
Cingular wasn’t just playing defense: “iPod Sales per Quarter,” Wikipedia; cross-checked with Apple financial statements.
No one had ever put: Christine Erickson, “The Touching History of Touchscreen Tech,” Mashable.com, 11/9/2012; Andrew Cunningham, “How Today’s Touchscreen Tech Put the World at Our Fingertips,” ArsTechnica.com, 4/17/2013; Bent Stumpe and Christine Sutton, “The First Capacitative Touch Screens at CERN,” CERN Courier, 3/31/2010; “Touchscreen Articles in Phones,” PhoneArena.com, 8/26/2008; Bill Buxton, “Multi-Touch Systems That I Have Known and Loved,” BillBuxton.com, 1/12/2007.
To ensure the iPhone’s: Vogelstein, “Untold Story.”
It all made the iPhone: Testimony from Scott Forstall, Apple’s then senior vice president for iPhone software, at Apple v. Samsung trial, 8/3/2012.
Through his friend: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 471.
“Steve didn’t want”: Forstall at Apple v. Samsung.
To Grignon’s amazement: Steve Jobs’s iPhone keynote address, 1/9/2007, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4OEsI0Sc_s.
2. The iPhone Is Good. Android Will Be Better.
But a visual encapsulation: Drawn from Google’s financial statements and my own visits there, cross-checked with Google media-relations executives. Also, Paul Goldberger, “Exclusive Preview: Google’s New Built-from-Scratch Googleplex,” Vanity Fair, VF Daily, 2/22/2013.
“We made an explicit decision”: Fred Vogelstein, “Google @ $165: Are These Guys for Real?,” Fortune, 12/13/2004; interview with Eric Schmidt at Google, Mountainview, CA, 11/2004.
Over the years: Ari Levy, “Benchmark to join Twitter in S.F.’s Mid-Market,” San Francisco Gate, 5/25/2012.
The easiest way: Adam Lashinsky, “Chaos by design,” Fortune, 10/2/2006.
Larry Page has never been shy: Google Investor Relations, “2012 Update from the CEO,” available at http://investor.google.com/corporate/2012/ceo-letter.html.
This wasn’t an exaggeration: Fred Vogelstein, “Search and Destroy,” Fortune, 5/2/2005.
“It’s hard to relate”: Testimony of Eric Schmidt in Oracle v. Google copyright trial, 4/24/2012.
All these fears and frustrations: Daniel Roth, “Google’s Open Source Android OS Will Free the Wireless Web,” Wired, 6/23/2008; Vogelstein, “GOOGLE @ $165.”
Page listened gamely: Roth, “Google’s Open Source”; Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 214.
Officially, the three: Fred Vogelstein, “Can Google Grow Up?,” Fortune, 12/8/2003.
Then there were legal issues: This comes from reading through trial transcripts and press reports of the Oracle v. Google copyright trial in 2012.
This thinking was firmly rooted: John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005), e-book location 1881–1921.
Google had clearly created: From Google financial statements, my own interviews, and various news reports.
Executives at companies: Matt Rosoff, “Other Than Facebook, Microsoft’s Investments Haven’t Worked Out So Well,” Business Insider, 5/8/2012.
“Google’s vision of Android”: Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), e-book location 4497.
Rubin believed that: Trial testimony of Andy Rubin in Oracle v. Google, 3/23/2012.
He said the iPhone was: Steve Jobs’s iPhone keynote address, 1/9/2007, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4OEsI0Sc_s.
At Apple in the late 1980s: John Markoff, “I, Robot: The Man Behind the Google Phone,” New York Times, 11/4/2007.
3. Twenty-Four Weeks, Three Days, and Three Hours Until Launch
But Forstall had: Adam Satariano, Peter Burrows, and Brad Stone, “Scott Forstall, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice at Apple,” Bloomberg Businessweek, 11/12/2011; Jessica Lessin, “An Apple Exit over Maps,” Wall Street Journal, 10/29/2012.
Fadell is not shy: Leo Kelion, “Tony Fadell: From iPod father to thermostat start-up,” BBC News, 11/29/2012.
Fadell was truly: Steven Levy, The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 54–74.
Forstall couldn’t
have been: Satariano et al., “Scott Forstall.”
Despite the feuding: Christina Kinon, “Say What? Mike stolen during live Q&A on Fox,” New York Daily News, 6/30/2007; Steven Levy’s interview on FOX News is accessible at www.youtube.com/watch?v=uayBcHDxfww.
Levy wrote about: Steven Levy, “A Hungry Crowd Smells iPhone, and Pounces,” Newsweek, 12/22/2007.
Looking back, the iPhone launch: These two paragraphs come from Apple financial statements and various news reports and reviews widely available at the time.
It generates $4.5 billion: “Apple’s CEO Discusses F2Q13 Results—Earnings Call Transcript,” SeekingAlpha.com, 4/23/2013.
After the unveiling, when: John Markoff, “Steve Jobs Walks the Tightrope Again,” New York Times, 1/12/2007.
Apple helped create and then took: This comes from the testimony of Phil Schiller, Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, at the Apple v. Samsung trial, 8/3/2012.
University Avenue and Kipling Street: The new Apple store in Palo Alto is at Florence Street and University Avenue.
4. I Thought We Were Friends
the Android team’s initial worries: Information for the following two paragraphs comes from trial testimony and exhibits in the Oracle v. Google trial; from Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 213–37; and from my own reporting.
Gundotra’s 2007 start date: Brad Stone, “Larry Page’s Google 3.0,” Bloomberg Businessweek, 1/26/2011; and my own reporting.
But Gundotra thrived: Levy, In the Plex, 219.
For example, the trio: Ibid., 218.
The secrecy, leaks, and backbiting: John Markoff, “I, Robot: The Man Behind the Google Phone,” New York Times, 11/4/2007.
It wasn’t just dull: Ryan Block, “Live coverage of Google’s Android Gphone mobile OS announcement,” Engadget.com, 11/5/2007; Danny Sullivan, “Gphone? The Google Phone Timeline,” SearchEngineLand.com, 4/18/2007; Miguel Helft and John Markoff, “Google Enters the Wireless World,” New York Times, 11/5/2007.
Google got more attention: See the first Android introduction and demo by Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz at www.youtube.com/watch?v=egxNkU5__hU.
Certainly, Google’s other initiatives: Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), e-book location 2842.
Perhaps the most powerful reason: Levy, In the Plex, 213–37; Auletta, Googled, e-book location 118–1132; Brad Stone and Miguel Helft, “Apple’s Spat with Google Is Getting Personal,” New York Times, 3/13/2010; and my own reporting.
“One Sunday morning”: From Vic Gundotra’s Google Plus profile, https://plus.google.com/+VicGundotra/posts/gcSStkKxXTw.
But by spring 2008: My reporting and Levy, In the Plex, 213–37.
One piece of evidence: For a demonstration of the Star7, visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CsTH9S79qI.
5. The Consequences of Betrayal
Brin and Page refused: David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, The Google Story (New York: Delacorte, 2005), e-book location 1593–94.
Schmidt was hired: Affidavit from Lukovsky in Microsoft v. Kai-Fu Lee, 2005; Viacom complaint filed in 2007, https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fpublic%2Fresources%2Fdocuments%2FViacom031207.pdf; Saul Hansell, “Google and Yahoo Settle Dispute over Search Patent,” New York Times, 8/10/2004; see also Google IPO documents (for Yahoo! settlement).
The final push wasn’t: Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 213–37.
It had a slide-out keyboard: Walt Mossberg, “Google Answers the iPhone,” AllThingsD.Com, 10/15/2008.
Compared to the iPhone’s: My reporting and Levy, In the Plex, 227.
“Put yourself in Steve’s shoes”: Isaacson’s biography was the first to report that Jobs had been battling cancer since his first surgery in 2005. Jobs’s public position until he died was that his cancer had been cured.
Like Android, Google Voice: These three paragraphs combine my own reporting with Steven Levy’s from In the Plex, 213–37.
Almost all the media coverage: These are publicly available documents that news organizations secured through a Freedom of Information Act request—see www.apple.com/hotnews/apple-answers-fcc-questions and www.scribd.com/doc/18983640/Google-Response-to-FCC.
The Google Voice skirmish: Fred Vogelstein, “How the Android Ecosystem Threatens the iPhone,” Wired, 4/14/2011.
“Our lawsuit is saying”: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 512.
But in 2010 he said: Ibid., 513.
And at the end of 2012, Schmidt: “Jessica E. Lessin, “Google’s Explainer-in-Chief Can’t Explain Apple,” Wall Street Journal, 12/4/2012.
By 2010, however, big commercial customers: Wayne Rash, “Microsoft, New York City Ink Deal for Cloud Application Licenses,” eWeek.com, 10/20/2010.
Then, in 2008, it released Chrome: Steven Levy, “Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web,” Wired, 9/2/2008.
6. Android Everywhere
“It [Android] is”: Brad Stone, “Google’s Andy Rubin on Everything Android” (Bits blog), New York Times, 4/27/2010.
It was as if little else: This data comes from Google financial statements as well as from annual presentations by Mary Meeker, the former Wall Street technology analyst and current partner of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
An electronic poll: I witnessed this poll at the Fortune Brainstorm TECH conference in Aspen, July 2010.
“We have a product that allows”: This is from a presentation I saw Schmidt give at the DLD annual technology conference in Munich in January 2011.
In the fall of 2010 Vodafone tried: “Customer Backlash Forces Vodafone to Renege on Software Update” (Technology blog), Guardian, 8/12/2010.
Intellectually, it’s easy to understand: Stone, “Google’s Andy Rubin”; Jesus Diaz, “This Is Apple’s Next iPhone,” Gizmodo, 4/19/2010; Rosa Golijan, “The Tale of Apple’s Next iPhone,” Gizmodo, 6/4/2010; Miguel Helft and Nick Bilton, “For Apple, Lost iPhone Is a Big Deal” (Bits blog), New York Times, 4/19/2010; David Carr, “Monetizing an iPhone Spectacle,” New York Times, 4/25/2010; Jeff Bertolucci, “Gizmodo-iPhone Saga: Court Documents Reveal Fascinating Details,” PC World, 5/15/2010.
In June came: Fortune Brainstorm, Aspen, 2010; Matt Buchanan, “Apple, Antennagate, and Why It’s Time to Move On,” Gizmodo, 7/19/10; Nick Bilton, “Fallout from the iPhone 4 Press Conference” (Bits blog), New York Times, 7/19/2010.
AT&T made this debacle: Saul Hansell, “AT&T Declares Cold War on Verizon,” New York Times, 11/3/2009.
By 2010 many consumers: Fred Vogelstein, “Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown,” Wired, 7/19/2010.
Jobs did little to hide: Jason Snell, “Jobs Speaks: The Complete Transcript,” Macworld, 10/18/2010.
Because of the iPod: Apple press release, 4/9/2007.
Jobs said he never saw: Kara Swisher, “Full D8 Interview Video: Apple CEO Steve Jobs,” Steve Jobs interviewed by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg (video), AllThingsD.com, 6/7/2010, available at www.allthingsd.com/20100607/full-d8-video-apple-ceo-steve-jobs.
Apple’s three-year head start: “Apple Says App Store Has Made Developers over $1 Billion,” AppleInsider.com, 6/10/2010.
7. The iPad Changes Everything—Again
Starting in 2010 Jobs had: “Apple’s Diabolical Plan to Screw Your iPhone,” iFixIt.com, 1/20/2011.
“It turns out”: Beth Callaghan, “Steve Jobs’s Appearances at D, the Full Video Sessions,” AllThingsD.com, 10/5/2011.
He laid out his new invention: See Steve Jobs’s iPad keynote address, 1/27/2010, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTNbKCAFHJo.
Alan Kay, who is: Catharine Smith, “History of Tablet PCs,” Huffington Post, 6/15/2010; Jenny Davis, “The Tablet’s Long History” (Geekdad blog), Wired, 10/29/11; “Tablet Timeline,” PCMag, January 2013;
Jerry Kaplan, Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure (New York: Penguin, 1996), 1–36.
As the father of the Macintosh: See Jobs’s iPad keynote address.
The immediate reaction: “The Book of Jobs,” Economist, 1/28/2010; “Apple’s Hard-to-Swallow Tablet,” Wall Street Journal, 12/30/2009; Claire Cain Miller, “The iPad’s Name Makes Some Women Cringe” (Bits blog), New York Times, 1/27/2010.
The biggest criticism: Schmidt’s comments were made at a press briefing at the World Economic Forum in Davos, 1/28/2010; Brent Schendler, “Bill Gates Joins the iPad’s Army of Critics,” CBS MoneyWatch, 2/10/2010; John McKinley, “Apple’s iPad Is This Decade’s Newton,” Business Insider, 1/27/2010; Arnold Kim, “Apple Gives a Nod to Newton with New ‘What is iPad?’ Ad,” MacRumors, 5/12/2010.
With so much at stake: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 495.
“I spent a year and a half”: Joe Hewitt, “iPad,” JoeHewitt.com, 1/28/2010.
“This guy badgered me”: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 467.
Cue explained the evolution: John Paczkowski, “The Apple iBooks Origin Story,” AllThingsD.com, 6/14/2013.
Cue said the “page curls”: Peter Kafka, “Steve Jobs, Winnie the Pooh and the iBook Launch,” AllThingsD.com, 6/17/2013.
The problem, Cue said, was: Paczkowski, “The Apple iBooks Origin Story.”
When the first iPads: Apple quarterly financial statements (10-Q) for April 2010, July 2010, January 2011, and April 2011; Apple annual financial statement (10-K) for October 2010.
8. “Mr. Quinn, Please, Don’t Make Me Sanction You.”
The first section of this chapter includes testimony and scenes from the Apple v. Samsung patent trial in the summer of 2012. I witnessed the first three days of these proceedings and supplemented and cross-checked my reporting with the trial transcripts.
Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution Page 24