division. But it was a big ‘fuck you’ to the people who couldn’t get in. Everyone knows who the rock stars are in a company, and when you start to see them all slowly get plucked out of your area and put in a big room behind glass doors that you don’t have access to, it feels bad.”
Even people within the iPhone project itself couldn’t talk to one another. Engineers designing the iPhone’s electronics weren’t allowed to see the software it would run. When they needed software to test the electronics, they were given proxy code, not the real thing. If you were working on the software, you used a simulator to test hardware performance.
And no one outside Jobs’s inner circle was allowed into chief designer Jony Ive’s wing on the first floor of Building 2. The security surrounding Ive’s prototypes was so tight that employees believed the badge reader called security if you tried to badge in and weren’t authorized. “It was weird, because it wasn’t like you could avoid going by it. It was right off the lobby, behind a big metal door. Every now and then you’d see the door open and you’d try to look in and see, but you never tried to do more than that,” said an engineer whose first job out of college was working on the iPhone. Forstall said during his testimony that some labs required you to “badge in” four times.
The four months leading up to announcement day were particularly rough, Grignon said. Screaming matches broke out routinely in the hallways. Engineers, frazzled from all-night coding sessions, quit, only to rejoin days later after catching up on their sleep. Forstall’s chief of staff, Kim Vorath, slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her. “We were all standing there watching it,” Grignon said. “Part of it was funny. But it was also one of those moments where you step back and realize how fucked-up it all is.”
To Grignon’s amazement23 and to that of many others in the audience, Jobs’s iPhone demo on January 9, 2007, was flawless. He started the show saying, “This is a day I have been waiting for two and a half years.” Then he regaled the audience with a myriad of tales about why consumers hated their cell phones. Then he solved all their problems—definitively. Virtually everyone in the audience had been expecting Jobs to announce a phone, yet they were still in awe.
He used the iPhone to play some music and watch a movie clip to show off the phone’s beautiful screen. He made a phone call to show off the phone’s reinvented address book and voice mail. He sent an email and a text, showing how easy it was to type on the phone’s touchscreen keyboard. He scrolled through a bunch of photos, showing how simple pinches and spreads of two fingers could make the pictures bigger or smaller. He navigated Amazon’s and The New York Times’ websites to show that the iPhone’s Internet browser was as good as the one on his computer. He found a Starbucks with Google Maps—and called the number from the stage—to show how it was impossible to get lost with an iPhone.
By the end, Grignon wasn’t just happy, he was drunk. He’d brought a flask of Scotch to calm his nerves. “And so there we were in the fifth row or something—engineers, managers, all of us—doing shots of Scotch after every segment of the demo. There were about five or six of us, and after each piece of the demo, the person who was responsible for that portion did a shot. When the finale came—and it worked along with everything before it, we all just drained the flask. It was the best demo any of us had ever seen. And the rest of the day turned out to be just a shit show for the entire iPhone team. We just spent the entire rest of the day drinking in the city. It was just a mess, but it was great.”
The iPhone Is Good. Android Will Be Better.
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.
