Battle of the Titans: How the Fight to the Death Between Apple and Google is Transforming our Lives

Battle of the Titans: How the Fight to the Death Between Apple and Google is Transforming our Lives
Fred Vogelstein

The deathmatch between Apple and Google is not just a story of corporate competition – it’s a dramatic saga of a friendship gone sour, of trust and agreements betrayed, of visionaries Steve Jobs and his successor Tim Cook versus Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt. This is a story of bickering, backstabbing, poaching and paranoia, of hardware versus software and patents versus products.After more than a decade of reporting on this rivalry, Fred Vogelstein has incredible access to the boardroom conversations, unofficial reactions, outbursts, personalities, deals, lawsuits and allegations that have shaped how we use these products.

BATTLE OF THE TITANS

Fred Vogelstein

Copyright (#ulink_6f113110-da05-5a79-a19e-539383446de1)

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://WilliamCollinsBooks.com)

First published as Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution in Great Britain by William Collins in 2013

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013

Copyright © Fred Vogelstein 2013

Fred Vogelstein asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780007448401

Ebook Edition © 2013 ISBN: 9780007448418

Version: 2014-10-01

Dedication (#ulink_154cd3bb-68e2-59db-9f76-9c2d89876c92)

For Evelyn, Sam, and Beatrice

Contents

Cover (#uc243080b-2c74-5ce3-8b79-273e9ae57d8d)

Title Page (#u6fb28459-7f30-533e-9ee6-cd342e43e68b)

Copyright (#u4f31facd-7d4d-5c18-8711-565b47d68c28)

Dedication (#ub4612826-5ad6-5df7-bf1a-3a67f73ee845)

Introduction (#ue2568732-d1d6-5fbf-8120-dd4443bbfaab)

1. The Moon Mission (#ue01ed341-1083-55a9-8d34-a881852ed2db)

2. The iPhone Is Good. Android Will Be Better. (#u8f2b7074-015b-5f3d-823c-d1cda2315de7)

3. Twenty-Four Weeks, Three Days, and Three Hours Until Launch (#litres_trial_promo)

4. I Thought We Were Friends (#litres_trial_promo)

5. The Consequences of Betrayal (#litres_trial_promo)

6. Android Everywhere (#litres_trial_promo)

7. The iPad Changes Everything—Again (#litres_trial_promo)

8. “Mr. Quinn, Please, Don’t Make Me Sanction You.” (#litres_trial_promo)

9. Remember Convergence? It’s Happening (#litres_trial_promo)

10. Changing the World One Screen at a Time (#litres_trial_promo)

A Note on My Reporting (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Introduction (#ulink_2a7722be-4321-5497-9957-5e4c81ae636a)

When Steve Jobs stood before the world at the beginning of 2007 and said he was going to reinvent the cell phone, the expectations were modest—at best. Jobs had upended the music business with the iPod and iTunes. But taking on the cell phone industry? That seemed unlikely. The wireless carriers, who controlled the market, had been foiling cell phone innovators for years. And the iPhone, while cool looking, seemed no match for their iron grip on the industry. It was more expensive than most phones out there. And it was arguably less capable. It ran on a slower cell/data network. And it required users to type on a virtual, not a physical, keyboard. To some critics, that meant the iPhone was dead on arrival.

If anything, Jobs undersold the iPhone that day. It truly was a breakthrough. The iPhone wasn’t really a phone, but the first mainstream pocket computer that made calls. With its touchscreen, it did so many things that other phones could never do that consumers overlooked its shortcomings. Consumers got used to the virtual keyboard, and Apple continued to make it better and better. It cut the price to equal that of other phones. It quickly upgraded the slower cell/data radios to make its technology competitive. It developed displays with unheard-of resolutions. It bought a chip design company to make sure the iPhone was always the fastest device out there. It rolled out a completely new version of the iPhone software every year. And it designed iconic television ads—as it had done for the iPod—that made consumers feel special about owning one.

The subsequent frenzy of demand gave Apple and Jobs the leverage to turn the tables on the wireless carriers and start telling them what to do. More important, it ignited a technology revolution that today touches almost every corner of civilization. The iPhone has become

one of the most popular cell phones of all time, selling more than 135 million units in 2012 alone. It has become the platform for a new and hugely profitable software industry—phone apps—that has generated more than $10 billion in total revenues since starting five years ago, in 2008. And the iPhone has become the source of an entire rethink of how humans interact with machines—with their fingers instead of buttons or a mouse. The iPhone and its progeny—the iPod Touch and the iPad—haven’t just changed the way the world thinks about cell phones, they have changed the way the world thinks about computers for the first time in a generation, arguably since the advent of the Macintosh in 1984.

Since 2010, when Jobs followed the iPhone with the iPad, the questioning has grown frenzied. Who said our computer had to sit under our desk or on our lap? Can’t it just be a screen that fits in our pocket or purse, or something we leave lying around the house? Indeed, if you compare iPad sales to sales of desktops and laptops, Apple is now the largest

PC maker in the world. It now sells more iPads per quarter than Dell or HP sells laptops and desktops. Apple’s total sales of iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches now exceed 200 million devices a year. That’s about the same number of TVs sold by all manufacturers every year and about four times the number of cars sold worldwide. All of this has turned Apple, the corporation, into a colossus larger than even Jobs’s enormous ambitions. Once on the precipice of bankruptcy, in 1997, Apple today is one of the most valuable and profitable companies anywhere.

And yet Apple behaves like a corporation under siege—because despite all this success, it is. From the moment in late 2007 that Google unveiled Android—and its own plan to dominate the world of mobile phones and other mobile devices—Google hasn’t just tried to compete with the iPhone, it has succeeded in competing with the iPhone. Android took hold in 2010, and it has exploded in popularity since. To Apple’s astonishment

, there are now more smartphones and tablets running Android software than there are iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches running Apple’s software, known as iOS. In 2012 there was even debate about whether the iPhone was the most popular smartphone anymore. During the third quarter of 2012