Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution (14 page)

Five years later tempers are
still
hot over this incident. Gundotra says he had never witnessed such high-handed, arrogant behavior anywhere else as during those conferences. “I thought Microsoft was arrogant. It was just unbelievable and very, very painful what happened there. I was optimistic and naive. I thought we could negotiate with Apple, and it would be fine. I had a relationship with Steve so I thought we could make everything work. That’s not how it worked out.” One of Jobs’s executives then is equally cranky about Gundotra. He told me that Gundotra might not have been a fan of Android, but he wasn’t a fan of Apple either. “He was trying to be liked by Steve and Phil and by Forstall, and he said he was doing his best to defend Apple inside of Google. But all he was doing was taking the information back to Larry and Sergey and the rest of the teams to get brownie points for himself. It was not about making Android better, necessarily, it was about making Vic better.”

Amid this escalating tension and the explosive success of the iPhone 3G in summer 2008, Jobs began concluding that Google’s Dream phone was, in fact, going to look a lot more like the iPhone than he wanted. To be released in November 2008, the Dream, to be called the T-Mobile G1, from HTC, would have a handful of multitouch features that Jobs believed belonged to Apple. Schmidt, Brin, and Page had been making Alan Eustace, Google’s head of engineering, available for months to answer Jobs’s questions and various objections about Android—and to keep Jobs from reaching this conclusion. Eustace was Rubin’s boss, and Eustace and Jobs had developed a good dialogue, friends say. But by summer 2008 Jobs felt he was getting nowhere with Eustace—that he and Google were just stringing Jobs along. “I think they [Jobs and Apple’s top executives] finally felt that the only way they were going to get this done was not to go through Alan anymore,” said someone who talked to Jobs about it. “Alan was translating for Andy [Rubin], and I think they felt like they had to go right to the source to get these things changed.”

Another Apple executive said that it was the second version of Android around then that was the final straw for Jobs. “When it started having swipe features and pinch and zoom and double tap, that’s when Steve threw down the gauntlet and said, ‘We’re going over there and we’re going to sit down and talk to them.’”

The reports from the meeting with Jobs, Forstall, Page, Eustace, and Rubin in the conference room outside Page’s office in Google’s Building 43 are varied. But they all agree on one thing: the meeting was nasty and confrontational. Jobs told the three Google executives that Apple had patented the multitouch features that Google was using, and that if they appeared on the G1 when it was released, Apple would sue. The Google team pushed back, saying that while Jobs may have been the first to make a successful product with multitouch gestures, he didn’t invent the technology or most of the technologies in the iPhone. One Apple executive who wasn’t there but listened to Jobs’s briefing about the meeting told me, “It got incredibly personal. Jobs said that Rubin was steamed, telling him that his position was anti-innovation. And this is where Steve was demeaning to Andy, saying Andy was trying to be like him, look like him, have the same haircut, the same glasses, the same style.”

No one at Google will talk about the meeting on the record, but off the record they continue to express puzzlement over Jobs’s position. They believe that there are very few firsts in Silicon Valley—that all innovations are built on the shoulders of others. There would have been no Intel or Motorola microprocessor without the transistor and the integrated circuit. Without those microprocessors there would have been no personal computer. Without the personal computer there would have been no Microsoft, Apple, or software industry in general. Without the software industry there would have been no Netscape web browser. And without the web browser much of what we take for granted in our lives today would not exist.

One piece of evidence the Googlers used to make their point in their negotiations with Jobs was a 1992 video of James Gosling, a famous Sun Microsystems engineer and inventor of the Java programming language, showing off the Star7. This crude-looking handheld device had a 200 KB radio; a four-inch, LCD, color TV screen; and speakers from a Nintendo Game Boy. Even then, before anyone but the richest executives had a mobile phone or had seen a Newton handheld, Gosling was showing off a machine not only with a touchscreen but with inertial scrolling. The harder you flicked the screen, the faster it scrolled through items. Rubin made the case that, if anything, he and the Android team had been thinking about
those
technologies before Jobs had. Rubin had seen prototypes of the Microsoft Surface—a tabletop multitouch display released in late 2007—when he worked at Microsoft briefly in the 1990s.

But Google’s evidence had zero impact on Jobs. “Steve was always of the opinion that Apple invented everything,” said one Google executive involved in the conversations. “And even when you showed him, ‘Here, this wasn’t invented by you,’ he still believes it was. No matter whether you could show him, ‘Look at all the places where multitouch was used before, or all these places where scrolling using your fingers was done before, or expansion of things [with your fingers] was done before,’ that didn’t sway Steve.”

5

The Consequences of Betrayal

For Google, the outcome of the meeting with Jobs and Forstall was excruciating. Schmidt, Brin, and Page completely capitulated, and no amount of logic could conceal how painful that was. It wasn’t just that Jobs had told them what features to take out of the G1 phone. He’d told them, in some cases,
how
to take them out. Android had long given users the option of creating a pattern on a three-by-three grid of dots to unlock the phone, with a minimum of a three-dot connection. But Jobs insisted that if users could connect the bottom three dots of the grid to unlock their phone, it would mimic the iPhone’s patented slide-to-unlock feature. “So to placate Apple we went from a pattern where you could connect three dots to one where you had to connect four,” said one senior engineer.

“It was really, really painful. It was almost like he was stealing from us,” Android’s Bob Lee said about Jobs. He continued,

Pinch to zoom [technically, finger-spread to zoom, pinch to unzoom] is a really very obvious thing, and Apple wasn’t the first to do it. Go back, as we did, and look at the stuff Sun did with mobile in the 1990s and the Microsoft Surface. It made me very resentful of Apple that they would play these kinds of games. I loved Apple. I had always developed programs on an Apple. I made it possible for Googlers to develop Google software on Apple machines. My cat’s name is Wozniak. I joined Android in 2006, and most of the stuff we came up with [is] from scratch. Why does it look so much like the iPhone? Well, I think a big part of it is just the technology catching up. Why didn’t somebody have a big touchscreen prior to the iPhone? Well, they were too expensive. So it wasn’t like the iPhone came along and people said we should start doing that. The whole industry had been thinking about it for a long time. It’s just that it finally became a viable thing to do.

No one who was in the meeting with Jobs will talk about it, and it’s easy to understand why. All entrepreneurs need to have a thick skin, but Brin, Page, and then Schmidt when he joined Google in 2001, had developed a reputation as being particularly tenacious when challenged. This wasn’t good for that image at all. From the moment they came up with a name for the company they had faced down their critics. They were told search was a go-nowhere business. This was considered such conventional wisdom that Schmidt almost didn’t interview for the CEO job because of it.

When Google got traction and attracted powerful venture capitalists, Brin and Page often ignored them. The VCs wanted Google to quickly find a professional CEO and settle on a way of making money to support the business. Brin and Page refused to be rushed, and the VCs—Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital—eventually became so angry they almost sued the founders.

Schmidt was hired in 2001. He had been CEO of Novell and a top executive at Sun Microsystems, and he, Brin, and Page have shrewdly managed most doubters and enemies since then. They settled on a business model—search advertising—that remade the economics of media and advertising, online and off. Then, when Google’s incredible success led to lawsuits and other broadsides, they gave little ground. Yahoo! sued Google in 2004 for stealing AdWords, the idea for search ads that continues to fuel Google’s business. Google gave Yahoo! a few hundred million dollars out of its IPO—Google got a business model that has generated hundreds of
billions
. Media giant Viacom tried to bully Google with a lawsuit in 2006. It charged that YouTube wasn’t doing enough to secure Viacom’s content from theft. Brin, Page, and Schmidt said Google was doing enough and would do more. They refused to settle and continued to win in court. When Google started hiring top engineers away from Microsoft, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer tried to block the hires with lawsuits and public ridicule. “Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I’m going to bury that guy,” Ballmer famously said to an employee announcing his departure for Google. Ballmer and Gates had made the world cower for twenty years with threats like this. Brin, Page, and Schmidt laughed at it—and Microsoft’s relevance in the tech world has been on the decline ever since. And when the world said Schmidt, Brin, and Page were crazy to get into mobile, they said, “Watch us.”

But Steve Jobs threatening a lawsuit was different. No matter how in the right Google felt, the triumvirate apparently believed that an Apple patent-infringement lawsuit would create huge problems for the company, colleagues say. Android was already a long shot. Releasing it to the world under a legal cloud would make those odds almost insurmountable. Android’s success depended on partners. Who would partner with Google while the lawsuit was pending? No one.

And they discussed whether an Apple lawsuit might cause broader problems for the whole of Google. Apple was still an underdog back then—not nearly as rich and dominant as it is today. But Google had become so powerful that it was an antitrust target. Regulators, competitors, and columnists wondered if it was becoming the next Microsoft—whether it was using its growing monopoly in search advertising to push other companies around.

Its purchase in 2007 of DoubleClick, the online display advertising company, had barely passed antitrust muster in early 2008. Google already controlled the online search advertising business. If it controlled the biggest company in online display advertising, would that give it control of
all
online advertising? antitrust regulators asked.

Google was in a fight with authors and book publishers over its plan to digitize their books. Making all books ever published searchable sounded like a great public good. But shouldn’t authors and publishers be paid for letting Google sell ads against their data in search listings? they asked. Google didn’t think so, as it intended to display only snippets relevant to search queries. It believed they would get paid in increased book sales.

And Google’s proposed search partnership with Yahoo! in the spring of 2008 had been generating furious criticism from the business and advertising communities. After being allowed to acquire DoubleClick, the Yahoo! deal seemed like a naked power grab. Aggressive lobbying by Microsoft, of all companies, helped convince Justice Department lawyers that they had an antitrust case against Google. They threatened to drag Google into court if it didn’t abandon the deal.

In addition, Google’s stock price was down. It had had to lay off employees. Because it had become such a large company by then—about twenty thousand employees—its ability to continue to be the innovation machine of the previous decade was being questioned. Big companies’ interest in protecting their existing businesses often interferes with their ability to back new and disruptive ideas. An Apple lawsuit accusing Google of stealing its intellectual property was not something they could afford to risk. “Apple made it clear that they were concerned about us violating their UI [user interface], and we agreed. We did not want to violate their UI” is all Schmidt will say about this matter.

The Jobs meeting was particularly difficult for Rubin, friends say. He was indeed as furious as Jobs described, and he almost quit Google over it. He understood what his bosses were saying intellectually. But Jobs had bullied him in front of his bosses, and they hadn’t backed him up. For a while thereafter he had a sign on his office whiteboard that read
STEVE JOBS STOLE MY LUNCH MONEY
.

Jobs’s demands that Google pull key features out of the G1 wasn’t just infuriating to the Android team on principle. It created an enormous practical problem. By the summer of 2008, the G1 was two months away from launch, but it wasn’t close to being ready. Now additionally the engineers were going to have to rewrite its software to exclude all the features Jobs wanted removed. The conventional wisdom about software is that features can be added and removed at will. The reality is that it is much more like writing a book. Chapters can be cut, but only a lot of work makes the cuts invisible.

The final push wasn’t made any easier when Page and Brin, who were usually helpful, allowed their personal obsessions to intrude. Page wanted the device to work as fast with his enormous list of more than twenty thousand contacts as it would for any other user. To the Android team that seemed like the perfect becoming the enemy of the good. They suggested that that capability should wait until the second version of Android. Page was not persuaded. Brin, meanwhile, demanded that users be able to scroll through their contact list by tilting the phone and letting its accelerometer decide how fast to scroll based on the angle of the tilt. Erick Tseng, the Android project manager, said, “We actually had an engineer build it. Then we showed Sergey how it wasn’t a good user experience,” and Brin agreed.

“I personally thought we weren’t going to make it,” Rubin told Steven Levy for the book
In the Plex
. “Three months before we were supposed to ship, nothing worked. Crashed all the time. Couldn’t receive email. Superslow. And over time it got more and more unstable.”