Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution (30 page)

Indeed, when Page made his remarks, the innovation gap between Apple and Google for dominance of the mobile Internet looked downright stark. In the fall of 2012, Apple had released the iPhone 5, its bestselling phone to date, and the iPad mini, which was also a success despite its smaller profit margins. But it had been more than three years since the last breakthrough product—the iPad. And the TV/device that Jobs had mentioned in Walter Isaacson’s biography, and which Cook has also alluded to, was nowhere to be seen.

Meanwhile, Google had unleashed a slew of new and improved software that was astonishing in its breadth and depth. Google unveiled Google Now, a mobile application that slickly anticipates and displays information users might need on the fly, such as travel and restaurant reservations and their expected commute time. It launched a music streaming service to compete with Spotify, leaving many wondering how Google had beaten Apple—the inventor of iTunes—to that market. It showed off a remarkable automatic photo editing feature for Google Plus. Using the horsepower in Google’s millions of servers, the feature goes through your entire photo library, auto-selecting and auto-editing the best pictures. And it demonstrated improvements to Google’s voice search that would make it finally useful for everyday tasks—like the voice-activated computers in
Star Trek
and other science fiction movies. When it’s rolled out, Google says, you’ll be able to ask your laptop, smartphone, or tablet anything—and it will respond accurately. The improvements made Siri, Apple’s voice-command technology in the iPhone, seem quaint. In August 2013 it unveiled its first Motorola smartphone.

Even the products Google had no intention of selling immediately were generating enormous buzz. It demonstrated that its driverless-car software actually works. It showed that Google Glass—a computer in a pair of eyeglasses—may indeed fuse man and his machine.

It’s tempting to predict that it’s only a matter of time before Apple comes back with its own new revolutionary device. Certainly that’s how the competition between the two has been up until now. What’s unclear is whether Apple can do it without Jobs at the helm. Apple certainly encouraged investors to feel as if this question had been answered when its stock and profits skyrocketed after Jobs’s death. But a year later, by the fall of 2012, Jobs’s absence was, if anything, becoming more obvious by the day.

Take Apple’s advertising, for example. It no longer sparkled. Jobs had personally reviewed Apple’s advertising, and its TV spots had always been iconic. But the television ads that aired during the 2012 London Olympics—the Genius Bar employee spots—were so bad, they generated headlines. Indeed, the best phone ads of 2012 and 2013 came from Samsung, Google’s biggest Android phone maker. After Apple unveiled the iPhone 5, Samsung pounced with a barrage of TV spots that amusingly depicted iPhone users as misguided elitists waiting in line for a phone that was inferior in every way to the Galaxy S III.

Apple was also taking heat for the way it was making its phones.
The New York Times
, in a handful of long articles about the “iEconomy,” presented evidence that Apple was making its iPhones and iPads in Asian sweatshops, forcing CEO Tim Cook to acknowledge Apple could do more to make its contractors provide safer workplaces. A year later he was apologizing to Chinese customers for Apple’s unresponsiveness to customer service and technical support issues.

But perhaps the most notable example of Jobs’s absence was the public relations disaster surrounding Apple’s new mapping application. Apple had made a big deal about how it and Google had parted ways over maps, saying that Google was using its control of the technology as a cudgel in negotiations. But when Apple unveiled its homegrown solution along with the iPhone 5, the application was full of bugs. For nearly a month chat boards and social networks teemed with examples of egregious errors—the Washington Monument in the wrong place, the Brooklyn Bridge melting, and directions that led drivers to the wrong destination—that made the app effectively useless and prompted Cook to apologize to customers and then push out many of those responsible, among them the iPhone software boss, Scott Forstall. Most of all, it made many wonder whether Jobs would ever have allowed such a blunder to get through.

The maps fiasco not only made Apple look bad, it made Google look heroic. Google quickly rewrote its own maps application, making many improvements. Then, when Google updated it three months later, headlines worldwide made note of how much better it was than Apple’s. Ten million users downloaded the Google maps application in forty-eight hours.

Apple’s Tim Cook knows all the challenges he faces and says he has the answers. “We’re still the company that is going to do that [change the game]. We have some incredible plans that we have been working on for a while. The culture is all still there, and many of the people are still there. We have several more game changers in us,” he said during an onstage interview at the end of May 2013. Apple was widely believed to be working on a complete redo to the look of its iPhone and iPad software. Cook didn’t deny this in the interview. And Cook continued to talk generally about Apple’s interest in making the television-watching experience better.

But there wasn’t much more to Cook’s remarks. Instead of using the stage—as Google’s Larry Page had—to lay out a broad vision for the future, it seemed that Cook’s overall goal was to say as little of substance as possible. He said “I don’t want to go into detail about that” often. That’s typical for many CEOs in these situations. Cook’s problem is that he is not being compared to most CEOs. He is being compared to Google’s cofounder Larry Page and, of course, to his predecessor, Steve Jobs.

Jobs was a master at moments like this. In 2010, when he was asked about why the iPad was important, he said, “When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.” Jobs was equally unspecific about future products, but his vision was so clear and compelling that it seemed not to matter.

Comparing anyone to Steve Jobs is unfair. And during his two years as Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook has taken pains to point out that Jobs himself had made it clear to him that he didn’t want Cook running Apple the way he thought Jobs would want to but the way Cook thought it should be done. It’s nice that Jobs let Cook off the hook like that. What isn’t clear is how meaningful a gesture it was. Jobs is gone, and Apple’s customers, vendors, investors, employees, and fans
do
want Cook to be just like him—even if they won’t admit it. They are unlikely to leave him alone about that shortcoming until Cook shows the world his own revolutionary new thing. During the audience question-and-answer period, Dan Benton, the well-known technology hedge fund investor, laid out these concerns plainly: “Why won’t you give us a view of the future,” Benton asked, suggesting that Google has become better at painting a picture of things to come. Cook’s response: “We believe in the element of surprise.” Perhaps by the time you read this, that will once again, from Apple, be considered a good thing.

A Note on My Reporting

This book is the outgrowth of, depending how you count, two, seven, or sixteen years of work. I’ve been writing about technology and media since 1997, first for
U.S. News & World Report
and
Fortune
, and since 2006 for
Wired
. I’ve been writing about the mobile revolution since the iPhone was unveiled in 2007. The reporting and writing for this project has been my full-time job since 2011. Along with previous reporting I had done, it is the product of more than a hundred interviews. That was supplemented by my reading thousands of pages of books, newspaper and magazine articles, trial transcripts, and exhibits. It was also supplemented by my attendance at dozens of Apple and Google public presentations, industry conferences, and the
Apple v. Samsung
patent trial in 2012. Where I was unable to attend presentations and conferences personally, I relied on official video feeds cross-checked with unofficial video and other reporting. I have relied on court transcripts for both the
Apple v. Samsung Electronics
trial and the
Oracle America v. Google
trial—both in 2012—even for the days when I attended. Where I relied on books, articles, transcripts, and video for my reporting, I have footnoted it. Where I relied on information from interviews, I have not.

For the history of patent law—about a third of chapter 8—I relied on the skilled research and writing help of Erin Biba, whom I worked with when she was a correspondent at
Wired
and who is now a columnist for
Popular Science
. I received fact-checking help from Bryan Lufkin, Katie M. Palmer, Elise Craig, and Jason Kehe. I found Bryan through my
Wired
contacts. He found Katie, Elise, and Jason. I take full responsibility for all errors and omissions, however.

Writing about any company is hard. It, like all of us, wants the world to see only its triumphs, not its worries, fights, and failures. So it is a journalist’s job to get behind that facade and find out what is really going on. Writing about Apple presents an even greater challenge. More than just about any other company, Apple goes out of its way to make it difficult for outsiders to see behind the facade. There are roughly half a dozen journalists with whom it occasionally cooperates around product launches. It also cooperated with my friend Steven Levy for a book about the iPod that was released in 2006. And Jobs himself solicited Walter Isaacson to write his acclaimed biography, which was published at the end of 2011. Every other book in the past twenty years that has involved Apple or Jobs has been done without his and Apple’s cooperation. That includes this one. I informed Apple about the project at its inception, and I kept them informed until the manuscript was finished. But they did not make anyone at the company available for an interview. Google did cooperate somewhat—it didn’t make Larry Page and Sergey Brin available for an interview, but it has made many other executives available over the years for this project and/or for other stories I have written, including its former CEO Eric Schmidt and former Android boss Andy Rubin.

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.