Читать книгу Battle of the Titans: How the Fight to the Death Between Apple and Google is Transforming our Lives - Fred Vogelstein - Страница 8

For all its fame and notoriety, Silicon Valley, as a place, isn’t much of a tourist attraction. There is no sign or Walk of Fame as in Hollywood. There isn’t an address, such as Wall Street, where the New York Stock Exchange has been for 150 years. It is just a slew of office parks sprawling thirty miles southeast from the San Francisco Airport to San Jose.

But a visual encapsulation²⁴ of the Valley’s brilliant, driven, and zany gestalt does exist. You just have to know someone at Google to go see it. Located thirty-five miles southeast of San Francisco next to Highway 101 in Mountain View, Google’s sprawling campus resembles few other corporate facilities in the world. The company started in a Stanford University dorm room in 1998 and has in fifteen years grown into one of the most important and powerful companies in the world. Google now controls more than sixty-five buildings in Mountain View and employs a third of its roughly fifty-five thousand workers there. Size hasn’t made Google slow or stuffy. Visual signs of its unconventional approach to problem solving remain everywhere. Googlers on red, green, and blue bicycles and motorized scooters zip from building to building. A fifteen-foot-high replica of a T. rex named Stan presides over the main outdoor lunch patio. A few feet away is a replica of SpaceShipOne, Burt Rutan’s first manned private spaceship in 2004. Many lobbies have pianos and vibrating massage chairs; and many restrooms have heated Japanese toilet seats—an odd experience on a hot day when the person before you has forgotten to turn the heater off. Google uses so many solar panels for power that it ranks as one of the largest corporate solar installations in the world. Meanwhile, an entire fleet of Wi-Fi-enabled commuter buses run to and from San Francisco, Berkeley/Oakland, and San Jose. They not only encourage employees to conserve gas by not driving, but they allow Google to tap into a bigger population of potential employees. Food and drink everywhere on campus are free.

It feels like a college campus, and that’s exactly how it’s supposed to feel. The source of Google’s success has been the quality of the engineers it hires out of top colleges. Rather than make them feel as if they’ve just joined the marines—as other corporations might—Google wants to keep them feeling that they’ve never left school so that they stay creatively wide-eyed. The campus has a swimming pool, gyms, a convenience store, a day-care center, a place to get haircuts, and drop-off dry cleaning. Almost every building has a laundry room. One summer back in 2004 a bunch of summer interns tried to live at Google rather than search for housing. They slept on couches and ran their whole lives out of the Googleplex until they were told they were violating the fire code.

“We made an explicit decision²⁵ to keep the buildings crowded,” Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt told me back then. “There’s kind of a certain amount of noise that kind of gets everybody to work and gets them excited. It’s really based on how computer-science graduate schools work. If you go to a graduate school, like go to the Stanford Computer Science building, you’ll see two, three, or even four in an office. That model is one which is very familiar to our programmers and for us because we were all in those offices too, and we know it’s a very productive environment.”

Over the years²⁶ these perks and oddities have been so widely imitated by other corporations that it is now impossible to explain Silicon Valley without mentioning them. Google’s company bus fleet is arguably driving an entire reconfiguration of work-life patterns in the Bay Area. Most big Silicon Valley companies now offer such buses. The one downside of working in Silicon Valley after college used to be living in suburban Mountain View, Palo Alto, or Sunnyvale. City life in San Francisco wasn’t worth the more than two hours of driving it required to live there. Google’s buses, which all have Wi-Fi, make those commutes not only tolerable but some of the most productive hours of the day. So many high-tech workers now live in San Francisco that some of the newest technology companies have followed them. A decade ago companies such as Zynga and Twitter would have automatically located in Silicon Valley. When they started more than six years ago, they located in San Francisco. Benchmark Capital, a top venture capital firm, just opened its first office in their neighborhood too.

All this has made Google a rigorous yet chaotic place to work. Especially back in 2005 there were often dozens of engineering projects going at the same time. Many of them had conflicting ambitions. And some were so secret that only a handful of top executives knew about them. The most secret and ambitious of these was Google’s own smartphone effort—the Android project. Tucked in a first-floor corner of Google’s Building 44, surrounded by Google ad reps, its four dozen engineers thought that they too were on track to deliver a revolutionary device that would change the mobile phone industry forever. By January 2007, they’d all worked sixty-to-eighty-hour weeks for fifteen months—some for more than two years—writing and testing code, negotiating software licenses, and flying all over the world to find the right parts, suppliers, and manufacturers. They had been working with prototypes for six months and had planned a launch by the end of the year … until Jobs took the stage to unveil the iPhone.

Chris DeSalvo’s reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. “As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought, ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”

For most of Silicon Valley—including most of Google—the iPhone’s unveiling was something to celebrate. Jobs had once again done the impossible. Four years before he’d talked an intransigent music industry into letting him put their catalog on iTunes for ninety-nine cents a song. Now he had convinced a wireless carrier to let him build a revolutionary smartphone. But for the Google Android team, the iPhone was a kick in the stomach. “What we had suddenly looked just so … nineties,” DeSalvo said. “It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it.”

DeSalvo wasn’t prone to panic. Like many veteran engineers in the Valley, laconic would be a good description of his personality. He’s an expert sailor who had just returned from taking his family on a three-week excursion in Indonesia. He’d been writing software for two decades, first for video-game developers, then for Apple, and by 2000 for a start-up called Danger. There were few software-development issues he hadn’t encountered. After joining Google and the Android team in Mountain View at the end of 2005 and spending a year writing thousands of lines of code out of a utility closet (he likes writing code in silence), he’d moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the week before to help the team integrate a recent acquisition. But as he watched Jobs’s presentation from a run-down office above a T-shirt shop there, he knew his boss, Andy Rubin, would be thinking the same thing he was. He and Rubin had worked together for most of the previous seven years, when DeSalvo had been an engineer at Danger, Rubin’s first start-up. Rubin was one of the most competitive people DeSalvo knew. Rubin was not about to release a product that suddenly looked so dated.

Six hundred miles away in Las Vegas, on his way to a meeting with one of the myriad handset makers and carriers that descend on the city for the Consumer Electronics Show, Rubin reacted exactly as DeSalvo predicted. He was so astonished by what Jobs was unveiling that, on his way to a meeting, he had his driver pull over so that he could finish watching the webcast. “Holy crap,” he said to one of his colleagues in the car. “I guess we’re not going to ship that phone.”

What the Android team had been working on, a phone code-named Sooner, sported software that was arguably more revolutionary than what had just been revealed in the iPhone. In addition to having a full Internet browser, and running all of Google’s great web applications, such as search, Maps, and YouTube, the software was designed not just to run on Sooner, but on any smartphone, tablet, or other portable device not yet conceived. It would never need to be tethered to a laptop or desktop. It would allow multiple applications to run at the same time, and it would easily connect to an online store of other applications that Google would seed and encourage. By contrast, the iPhone needed to connect to iTunes regularly, it wouldn’t run more than one application at a time, and in the beginning it had no plans to allow anything resembling an application store.

However, the Sooner phone was ugly. It looked like a BlackBerry, with a traditional keyboard and a small screen that wasn’t touch-enabled. Rubin and his team, along with partners HTC and T-Mobile, believed consumers would care more about the great software it contained than its looks. This was conventional wisdom back then. Revolutionary phone designs rarely succeeded. The Nokia N-Gage, which in 2003 tried to combine a gaming system with a phone and email device, often gets mentioned here. RIM had become one of the dominant smartphone makers on the planet by making BlackBerry’s unadorned functionality one of its main selling points: you got a phone, an incredible keyboard, secure email, all in one indestructible package.

The iPhone, in contrast, was not only cool looking, but it used those cool looks to create entirely new ways to interact with a phone—ways that Android engineers either hadn’t thought possible or had considered too risky. By using a virtual keyboard and replacing most real buttons with software-generated buttons on a big touchscreen, every application could now have its own unique set of controls. Play, Pause, and Stop buttons only appeared if you were listening to music or watching video. When you went to type a web address into the browser, the keyboard appeared, but it disappeared when you hit Enter. Without the physical keyboard taking up half the phone, the iPhone had a screen twice the size of virtually every other phone on the market. It all worked the same way whether the user held the phone in portrait or landscape mode. Apple had installed an accelerometer to use gravity to tell the phone how to orient the screen.

A lot was wrong with the first iPhone too. Rubin and the Android team—along with many others—did not think users would take to typing on a screen without the tactile feedback of a physical keyboard. That is why the first Android phone—the T-Mobile G1 from HTC, nearly two years later—had a slide-out keyboard. But what was also undeniable to the Android team was that they had underestimated Jobs. At the very least, Jobs had come up with a new way of interacting with a device—with a finger instead of a stylus or dedicated buttons—and likely a lot more. “We knew that Apple was going to announce a phone. Everyone knew that. We just didn’t think it would be that good,” said Ethan Beard, one of Android’s early business development executives.

Within weeks the Android team had completely reconfigured its objectives. A phone with a touchscreen, code-named Dream, that had been in the early stages of development, became the focus. Its launch was pushed out a year until fall 2008. Engineers started drilling into it all the things the iPhone didn’t do to differentiate their phone when launch day did occur. Erick Tseng, then Android’s project manager, remembers suddenly feeling the nervous excitement of a pending public performance. Tseng had joined Google the year before out of Stanford business school after Eric Schmidt, himself, sold him on the promise of Android. “I never got the feeling that we should scrap what we were doing—that the iPhone meant game over. But a bar had been set, and whatever we decided to launch, we wanted to make sure that it cleared the bar.”

In many ways the Android project is the perfect reflection of Google’s zany and chaotic culture. At most companies, outlandish ideas are discouraged in favor of ideas that are doable. At Google, especially back then, the reverse was true. The easiest way²⁷ to get on cofounder and now CEO Larry Page’s bad side was not to think big enough and to clutter a pitch with how much money an idea could make. Back in 2006 Page famously gave Sheryl Sandberg praise for making a mistake that cost Google several million dollars. That was when Sandberg was a Google vice president in charge of its automated ad system, not the chief operating officer of Facebook. “God, I feel really bad about this,” Sandberg told Page, according to Fortune magazine. But instead of hammering her for the error, Page said, “I’m so glad you made this mistake because I want to run a company where we are moving too quickly and doing too much, not being too cautious and doing too little. If we don’t have any of these mistakes, we’re just not taking enough risk.”

The cell phone industry in 2005 was a perfect example of a hairy Google-size problem. The software industry for mobile phones was one of the most dysfunctional in all technology. There wasn’t enough wireless bandwidth for users to surf the Internet on a phone without frustration. Phones weren’t powerful enough to run anything but rudimentary software. But the biggest problem, as Jobs had learned, was that the industry was ruled by an oligopoly: Few companies besides the carriers and the phone makers were writing software for phones, and what existed was terrible. Wireless bandwidth would improve and phone chips would get more powerful; but back then it looked as if the carriers and phone makers would control it all. “We had done a deal with Vodafone [the big European carrier] to try to get Google search on their phones,” said one top Google executive who would not give his name. “But the search they offered us was that we could put some results on, but that they would control most of them, and that our results would be at the bottom of every query. They didn’t have a good mobile browser. Ringtones [that they were selling] sometimes got prioritized in search results. All the carriers were doing this. They thought they could provide all the services inside a walled garden [as AOL had in the 1990s], and that this control was the best way to make money.”

The reason few developers built software for mobile phones was because anytime they tried, they lost money. There was no standardization in the industry. Virtually every phone ran its own software and set of applications, meaning software written for a Samsung phone often wouldn’t run on a Motorola phone, which wouldn’t run on a Nokia. Software platforms were incompatible even within companies. For example, there were a handful of different versions of Symbian. Put simply, the mobile industry screamed “money pit” to any enterprising developer. Most stayed away. The most lucrative business was not writing apps for phones. It was owning a testing company that would make sure your apps worked on all the phones in the market. Larry Page has never been shy²⁸ talking about how frustrating those days were for him and Google. “We had a closet full of over 100 phones [that we were developing software for], and we were building our software pretty much one device at a time,” he said in his 2012 report to shareholders. In various remarks over the years he has described the experience as both “awful” and “incredibly painful.”

But Page and the rest of Google’s executives knew that someone would figure out the mobile business eventually, and they were particularly concerned that that company would be Microsoft. Back then, Microsoft was still the richest and most powerful technology company in the world, and it was finally getting traction with its Windows CE mobile phones and software. Windows CE smartphones were still a niche market, but if consumers took to the platform en masse as they did later with the iPhone, Google’s entire business could be in jeopardy.

This wasn’t an exaggeration²⁹. Back then, Microsoft and Google were in the midst of a nasty battle of their own for dominance in search, and for top dog in the tech world. After two decades of being the first-choice workplace of top engineering talent, Microsoft was now losing many of those battles to Google. Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer had made it clear they took Google’s challenge personally. Gates seemed particularly affected by it. Once or twice he made fun of the way Page and his Google cofounder Sergey Brin dressed. He said their search engine’s popularity was “a fad.” Then, in the same breath, he would issue the ultimate compliment, saying that of all his competitors over the years, Google was the most like Microsoft.

Google executives were convinced that if Windows on mobile devices caught on, Microsoft would interfere with users’ access to Google search on those devices in favor of its own search engine. The government’s successful antitrust trial against Microsoft in the 1990s made it difficult for the company to use its monopoly on desktops and laptops to bully competitors. It could not, for example, make Microsoft’s the default search engine in Windows without giving users a choice between its search engine and those from Google, Yahoo, and others. However, on smartphones, few rules governed how fiercely Microsoft could compete. It didn’t have a monopoly there. Google worried that if Microsoft made it hard enough to use Google search on its mobile devices and easy enough to use Microsoft search, many users would just switch search engines. This was the way Microsoft killed Netscape with Internet Explorer in the 1990s. If users stopped using Google’s search engine and began using a competitor’s such as Microsoft’s, Google’s business would quickly run aground. Google made all its money back then from the search ads that appeared next to its search results. “It’s hard to relate³⁰ to that [fear of Microsoft] now, but at the time we were very concerned that Microsoft’s mobile strategy would be successful,” Schmidt said in 2012 during testimony in the Oracle v. Google copyright trial.

All these fears and frustrations³¹ were top of the mind for Page when he agreed to meet with Rubin in early 2005 in the first-floor conference room of Google’s Building 43. Back then, Page’s office was on the second floor overlooking Google’s main courtyard. He and Brin shared it and continued that setup until Page became CEO in 2011. The space looked more like the dorm room of two engineering students than anything you would expect to see in a major corporation. You had to work to see their two desks and computers because the room was so jammed with their latest electronic-gadget passions—cameras typically for Page, along with Brin’s radio-controlled planes and cars and his roller-hockey gear. When Brin and Page were not there, the office was often filled with other programmers, who felt free to take it over. Rubin had reached out to Page because Rubin had started Android the year before and had enough software written to show potential customers such as carriers. He thought some kind of sign from Google—such as an email from Page saying that Android was doing interesting work—would help Rubin raise more money to keep going and give his sales pitch more zing.

Few people can just email Larry Page directly and successfully ask for a meeting, but back then Rubin was one of them. Three years earlier, when Google was still scrabbling for users, attention, and revenue, Rubin had made Google the default search engine on the T-Mobile Sidekick, the device Rubin designed and built when he ran Danger. Page remembered the gesture not just because Google had desperately needed search traffic at the time, but also because he thought the Sidekick was one of best-engineered mobile devices he’d ever seen.

The Sidekick was odd looking—shaped like a bar of soap with a screen in the middle. To operate it, one flipped up the screen, rotating it 180 degrees, and typed on the keyboard underneath. Its nonstandard looks and a nonexistent marketing budget kept it from being a hit product. But it had a cult following among two groups: savvy high school and college students and Silicon Valley engineers. Students liked that it was the first mobile device to have instant-messaging software built in. Engineers such as Page loved that it was the first mobile device to allow users to surf the Internet the same way as on their office computers. BlackBerry had mobile email down to a science, and everyone at Google had a BlackBerry. But the Internet browsers on it and other mobile devices were terrible. To deal with smaller bandwidth back then, browsers were designed to show only the bare bones of a web page’s content—typically just text. But that also made the browsing experience all but useless for businesses. One of the things that wouldn’t work in these crippled browsers were Google search ads. You couldn’t click on them. Soon Page and Brin were walking around with Sidekicks themselves, enthralling their friends and colleagues with a mobile device that nearly replaced their laptops.

According to Wired, when Page arrived for the meeting, late as usual, Rubin jumped to the whiteboard to begin his pitch: phones with computer capabilities, not laptops or desktops, were the future of technology. It was a huge market, Rubin said. More than 700 million cell phones were sold worldwide every year, compared to 200 million computers, and that gap was widening. But the phone business was stuck in the dark ages. Android would fix that problem by convincing carriers and phone makers that they didn’t need to spend money on their own proprietary software. Frustrated consumers would flock to phones that worked better. Software developers would rush to write software for a platform in such demand. A self-reinforcing software ecosystem would be born.

Page listened gamely³². He looked at the prototype Rubin had brought with him. But Page had pretty much decided what he was going to do before the meeting even started: What if Google just bought Android? he asked. He later told Steven Levy, the author of In the Plex, “We had that vision [about what the future of mobile should look like], and Andy came along and we were like ‘Yeah we should do it. He’s the guy.’” Google bought Android for about $50 million plus incentives, and by July 2005 Rubin and his seven other Android cofounders were sharing their vision of the world with the rest of Google’s management team.

Rubin was surprised and thrilled about Google’s decision to buy his company. “At Danger we had a great niche product [the Sidekick] that everyone loved. But I wanted to get beyond niche and make a mass-market product,” he said. And no company was more mass-market than Google. When reflecting on those days, he likes to tell a before-and-after story about a presentation he gave to phone maker Samsung in Seoul:

I walk into the boardroom with my entire team—me and six people. Then twenty executives walk in and stand on the other side of the table in the boardroom. We’re sitting down because I wasn’t accustomed to Asian culture and whatnot at the time. Their CEO walks in. Everyone sits only after he sits, like a military tribunal. Then I go into pitch mode. I pitch the whole Android vision to them like they are a venture capitalist. And at the end and I am out of breath, with the whole thing laid out … there is silence. Literally silence, like there are crickets in the room. Then I hear whispering in a nonnative language, and one of the lieutenants, having whispered with the CEO, says, “Are you dreaming?” The whole vision that I presented, their response was “You and what army are going to go and create this? You have six people. Are you high?” is basically what they said. They laughed me out of the boardroom. This happened two weeks before Google acquired us. The next day [after the acquisition was announced] a very nervous lieutenant of the CEO calls me up and says, “I demand we meet immediately to discuss your very, very interesting proposal that you gave us [when you were in Seoul].”

Because of Google, Rubin no longer had to worry about running out of money and having potential vendors and customers not return his calls. But after the euphoria of the acquisition wore off, it became clear that even at Google getting Android off the ground was going to be one of the hardest things Rubin had undertaken in his life. Just navigating Google itself was initially a challenge for Rubin and his team. There was no hard-and-fast org chart, as in other companies. Every employee seemed right out of college. And the Google culture, with its famous “Don’t be evil” and “That’s not Googley” sanctimony, seemed weird for someone such as Rubin, who had already been in the workplace twenty years. He couldn’t even drive his car to work because it was too fancy for the Google parking lot. Google was by then filled with millionaires who had gotten rich on the 2004 IPO. But in an effort to preserve Google’s brand as a revolutionary company with a revolutionary product—the anti-Microsoft—all cars fancier than a 3 Series BMW were banned. During this period Brin and Page—now worth more than $5 billion apiece—famously drove Priuses to work. That meant Rubin’s Ferrari was not allowed.

Rubin also had to adjust to no longer being the boss. He ran Google’s Android division, but even by the end of 2005 that was only about a dozen people in a corporation with fifty-seven hundred. But Google clearly didn’t treat Android like any of its many other small acquisitions. In those the founders rarely stayed, quickly discovering that actually working at Google was frustrating. Google often bought companies just to test out a new technology and/or hire talented engineers, but without a clear game plan. Page didn’t want Rubin to become frustrated like that, and he specifically tasked executives such as Alan Eustace—who helped Page negotiate the purchase of Android—to make sure Rubin felt that he had the access to the people and resources he needed. Google immediately opened its wallet to the tune of $10 million to help Rubin buy necessary software licenses. Schmidt personally helped negotiate some of them. To ensure the secrecy of their project, the Android team was allowed to keep its software code separate from the rest of Google, and inaccessible to anyone without Rubin’s permission. Page gave Rubin the rare privilege of being able to hire his own staff, instead of going through Google’s famously rigorous and lengthy hiring process.

But all this attention didn’t spare Rubin from having to navigate Google’s wacky politics. For starters, it wasn’t clear to him for a while who Google’s ultimate boss was. Eric Schmidt was the CEO and played a critical role in helping Google deal with its hypergrowth back then. He was also the public face of the company, which he did well and which Page and Brin had much less interest in doing. He had been a CEO before—at Novell—and an executive at Sun Microsystems for fourteen years before that. But Schmidt, who joined Google in 2001, was not a founder as were Page and Brin, which made his true role slightly murkier.

Officially, the three³³ ran Google as a triumvirate, but Google employees debated about how much power Schmidt actually had—whether Brin and Page called the shots, with Schmidt filling a largely ceremonial role, providing “adult supervision” in Silicon Valley parlance. Schmidt didn’t help with this confusion by describing his job the way a chief operating officer would, not a CEO. In an interview with me in 2004 he said,

My primary responsibility is making the trains run on time, so I try to make sure that the meetings happen, that all of the functions of a properly running company are in place and people are paying attention. Larry and Sergey have driven the top-level strategy and much of the technology strategy. I contribute by organizing the strategy process, but it’s really their strategy and their technology strategy. And if there is a disagreement among the three of us … we’ll have a significant conversation, and somebody will eventually say yes. A few months later somebody, one of the three, will say, ‘Well, maybe the other guy was actually right.’ So there’s a very healthy respect now between the three of us and it’s a wonderful thing. We’re best friends and we’re very good colleagues.

Rubin also noted to colleagues that it seemed to him as if Page and Schmidt didn’t completely agree on what Android should become. Schmidt wanted Android to be software only, and for a while he wondered if it should just be low-level software, without fancy graphics or animations. This was Rubin’s original vision: give phone makers and carriers code that runs all phones and applications the same way, but allows them to decide things such as what the opening screen would look like, and what kinds of graphic flourishes each phone would have. Page, however, was more interested in having Google build a phone. “I remember talking to Andy about this,” one Android executive told me. “He said he always made sure never to demonstrate an Android feature to Page without a prototype of the actual hardware it would run on.”

Then there were legal issues³⁴. Most of Android was open-source software, meaning no one owned it, and the code could be modified by anyone in any way. But not all of it was open source, and Google negotiated licenses for those portions for tens of millions of dollars. Rubin hoped a big chunk of licensed code would come from Sun Microsystems, makers of Java. Sun had spent ten years building Java as an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows. It typically gave the software away for free, on the condition the user didn’t modify it in a major way. Rubin used it for the operating system on the Sidekick, and it was, back then, a widely used language by engineers coming out of top universities. But Android wanted to modify Java more than Sun would allow. No amount of money seemed able to move Sun from this view. Payments as high as $35 million were discussed. This created two problems for Rubin: Without the Java code, Rubin had to spend months of extra time creating a work-around. Second, it infuriated Sun, which believed Google had copied portions of Java to build the work-around. It ultimately became the focus of a messy lawsuit that went to trial in 2012. Google was not held liable, but Sun, now owned by Oracle, is appealing that decision.

Finally, Rubin had the enormous task of just doing what he’d promised to do: build a mobile phone operating system that carriers and manufacturers would want to use and that software developers in addition to Google would want to write programs for. There certainly was precedent for it. It’s what Bill Gates did to transform the PC industry and become the world’s richest man. Most of us now just assume that any PC we buy will run Microsoft Windows or Apple OS X, and that it will have an Intel processor running on a certain kind of circuit board that connects to every printer, mouse, keyboard, monitor, and almost every other electronic device. But in the 1980s, the PC industry was just like the mobile industry in 2005. Not until Gates came along and used MS-DOS and Windows to create a platform for developers to write to did the PC application business take off. “I remember at the time telling Andy, ‘This is going to be really hard, really, really difficult. I don’t want you to get discouraged, but I think the chances are low on this,’” said Alan Eustace, Google’s head of engineering and Rubin’s boss at the time. “And then he and I would laugh about that because he was a true believer. It wasn’t that I was a skeptic. I supported the project all the time. It’s just that we both knew it was going to be hard.”

Some of the issues in building Android were similar to the ones Apple faced. Few people had put an operating system as sophisticated as Android on a phone chip. Meanwhile, all the testing had to be done on simulators because the actual chips and displays Rubin wanted to put on the Dream phone weren’t going to be manufactured for another year. But Google was in an even worse position than Apple to take on these challenges. At Apple the iPhone had nearly brought the company to its knees, but at least Apple was used to building things that consumers wanted to buy. Google had no such experience. Google made money selling advertising. Everything else it built—web software—it gave away for free. It had no fancy industrial-design division comparable to Apple’s. Indeed, the idea of a finished product of any sort was anathema to Googlers. To them the beauty of building web software was that it was never finished. When a feature was mostly done, Google would release it, then refine it over time based on consumer usage with updates to their servers.

Google also viewed marketing with the kind of contempt only an engineer could muster. If a product was good, word of mouth on the web would get people to use it. If it was not good, people would not use it. The idea that Google might be selling more than just a cool phone, but amorphous feelings of satisfaction and self-confidence—the way Jobs sold Apple’s devices—seemed silly. This thinking was firmly rooted³⁵ in Google’s DNA as a corporation. In Google’s early years executives had hired the famed consultant Sergio Zyman—the former head of marketing for Coca-Cola—to draw up a plan to get the world excited about their new company. After he spent months working on a plan, the founders rejected the whole marketing concept and did not renew Zyman’s contract. They believed—correctly—that Google’s search engine would sell itself. Google didn’t even have a director-of-marketing position until 2001.

Rubin and the Android team believed they could compensate for these deficits by partnering with wireless carriers and phone makers. That was the whole point of Android, after all: everyone would do what they did best. Google would write software, manufacturers would make phones, and carriers would supply bandwidth and sales and marketing heft. HTC and T-Mobile were committed to the project. They had helped Rubin build the Sidekick when he was at Danger.

Rubin’s problem was that T-Mobile wasn’t a big enough carrier in the United States to get Android on enough phones, and the two other big US wireless carriers, AT&T and Verizon, were deeply suspicious of anyone from Google interested in a business deal. For all Android’s promise and Rubin’s ability to sell that promise, by the end of 2006 the rest of Google was starting to scare people, telecom companies in particular. Google had clearly created³⁶ a new and incredibly profitable form of advertising, and it was recording profits and amassing cash at astonishing rates. In 2003 it had seemed like a friendly, plucky start-up. By the end of 2006 it was a colossus with nearly eleven thousand employees, $3 billion in profits, and more than 60 percent market share in search advertising. Would Google soon replace Microsoft as the big bad monopoly in tech? some started to ask.

Executives at companies³⁷ such as Verizon had experienced Microsoft’s aggressive behavior firsthand in the 1990s as Gates started trying to leverage his desktop monopoly into adjacent industries. Convinced that Windows would soon become the hub for the convergence of our PCs and TVs, Microsoft invested $1 billion in Comcast, $5 billion in AT&T, and another $500 million in smaller cable and telephone companies. Carriers worried that Gates didn’t just want to speed the adoption of broadband Internet and install Windows on every cable set-top box. They believed he wanted to make phone companies irrelevant.

Google, if anything, made the telecom industry more jumpy than Microsoft. For years Schmidt, Page, and Brin had had a team of engineers doing nothing but experimenting with ways to route around the telecom industry. As Google quickly became the most powerful company on the web, powerful enough to control the search-advertising business and spend $1.65 billion to buy YouTube in 2006, the telecom companies worried that Google might soon announce that it was becoming a carrier itself. By the spring of 2007, when Google announced it was buying online ad firm DoubleClick, these worries had crept into executive suites worldwide as well as into the halls of antitrust regulators in Washington and the European Union. “Google’s vision of Android³⁸ is Microsoft’s vision of owning the operating system of every PC,” a platform monopoly, former Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg told author Ken Auletta. “Guys like me want to make sure that there is a distribution of platforms and devices. Is it in Google’s interest to disintermediate us? Yeah.”

When Rubin and the Android team were done dealing with the initial shock of how good the iPhone was, little drama surrounded what needed to be done.

Rubin is at his core a start-up CEO—messianically convinced that his path is the best one regardless of whether people and circumstance agree with him. He was used to setbacks. The iPhone was good, but what he was doing was going to be different—and better. It would be technically superior to the iPhone and more widely distributed. Rubin believed that³⁹ all the software engineers at carriers and phone makers added 20 percent to the cost of a phone. With Android, they wouldn’t need that infrastructure and would be able to sell their phones for less. And the iPhone would help focus Google’s attention on the Android project. When the iPhone was announced, Rubin had about four dozen people. Two years later he’d have more than a hundred.

In retrospect, having the iPhone beat the first Android phones to market was arguably a good thing, some at Google have told me. Apple spent tens of millions of dollars educating consumers about how to use these new devices with a touchscreen. By the time Android phones started to arrive two years later, the iPhone had become hugely popular. That meant that those carriers who didn’t have the iPhone—which was everyone but AT&T at the time—were looking for an alternative. This wasn’t a short-term problem. AT&T’s contract with Apple gave them exclusive rights in the United States for four years. “They [the carriers and manufacturers] saw the writing on the wall, and that definitively helped Android. It helped cause people to sit up and take notice and take Android seriously,” Eustace said.

For Rubin and the Android team, the more complicated issue to emerge from the iPhone’s unveiling was their own company’s involvement in the iPhone’s project. Google, they learned, was Apple’s key partner in the venture. Indeed, Jobs had made the inclusion of Google software one of the iPhone’s selling points during his unveiling. He said the iPhone was⁴⁰ the “Internet in your pocket for the first time ever” and “You can’t think about the Internet without thinking about Google.” Google CEO Eric Schmidt had joined Jobs onstage during the unveiling to reinforce the depth of their partnership. “Steve, my congratulations to you. This product is going to be hot,” Schmidt said during three minutes of remarks.

The Android team knew Schmidt was on the Apple board. What they didn’t know was how tight the companies had become. While they were developing Android, a handful of engineers in another building a few hundred yards away had become privy to the Apple operation, possessing some of the Apple employees’ knowledge of the iPhone project. Inside Apple, Jobs strictly controlled and siloed access to the various portions of the iPhone project, and Schmidt made efforts to avoid conflicts of interest issues with Android and iPhone because of his position on the Apple board. And yet, some members of the Google team working on apps for the iPhone had seen the iPhone’s software and hardware development. “Apple particularly wanted the Google Maps product,” said one of the engineers. “Steve, I think, personally liked it a lot and wanted to make sure it was integrated into the iPhone. So we knew the iPhone was coming.”

Having two product teams seemingly in competition with each other wasn’t a new thing at Google. Many of Google’s best creations, such as Google News and Gmail, grew out of that philosophy. But the engineers at Android had also come to believe that maybe they were different. Cofounder Larry Page was their patron. They had privileges and perks that few other teams of their size at Google had. And they felt justified in having them. To them, it wasn’t just that Rubin had started Android or built the Sidekick, it was that he probably knew more about the mobile phone business than anyone else at Google, maybe all of Silicon Valley.

Then forty-four, he’d been building cutting-edge mobile products in Silicon Valley since the early 1990s. It was his vocation and his avocation. People describe his home as something akin to Tony Stark’s basement laboratory in Iron Man—a space jammed with robotic arms, the latest computers and electronics, and prototypes of various projects. Like many electronics whizzes in Silicon Valley, he had Tony Stark’s respect for authority too.

At Apple in the late 1980s⁴¹ he got in trouble for reprogramming the corporate phone system to make it seem as if CEO John Sculley were leaving his colleagues messages about stock grants, according to John Markoff’s 2007 profile in The New York Times. At General Magic, an Apple spin-off that wrote some of the first software for handheld computers, he and some colleagues built lofts above their cubicles so they could more efficiently work around the clock. After Microsoft bought his next employer, WebTV, in the mid-1990s, he outfitted a mobile robot with a web camera and microphone and sent it wandering around the company, without mentioning to anyone that it was connected to the Internet. The sights and sounds it recorded were beamed worldwide until Microsoft security, which was not amused, discovered the problem and turned it off. Danger, the company that made the Sidekick, got its name from what the robot in the 1960s TV show Lost in Space barked whenever it sensed, well, danger.

This loyalty to Rubin made his team worry about Google’s potential conflict of interest. Why should they even continue working on Android? Apple was now clearly light-years ahead of them, and Google’s top management was clearly behind that effort. Trying to compete with both Apple and their own company with a project that then seemed so inferior seemed like a waste of time.

“Frankly, the iPhone created a morale problem,” said one of the senior engineers. “Some of the engineers actually said, ‘Oh my God, we’re doomed. This is Apple. This is the Second Coming. What are we going to do now?’”

Rubin and those on down had the additional frustration of watching Jobs, in their view, wrongly take credit for innovations that were not his or Apple’s. Jobs was an amazing innovator who had an unparalleled sense for when to release a product, how to design the hardware and