Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution (31 page)

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.