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
