I think, personally liked it a lot and wanted to make sure it was integrated into the iPhone. So we knew the iPhone was coming.”
Having two product teams seemingly in competition with each other wasn’t a new thing at Google. Many of Google’s best creations, such as Google News and Gmail, grew out of that philosophy. But the engineers at Android had also come to believe that maybe they were different. Cofounder Larry Page was their patron. They had privileges and perks that few other teams of their size at Google had. And they felt justified in having them. To them, it wasn’t just that Rubin had started Android or built the Sidekick, it was that he probably knew more about the mobile phone business than anyone else at Google, maybe all of Silicon Valley.
Then forty-four, he’d been building cutting-edge mobile products in Silicon Valley since the early 1990s. It was his vocation and his avocation. People describe his home as something akin to Tony Stark’s basement laboratory in Iron Man—a space jammed with robotic arms, the latest computers and electronics, and prototypes of various projects. Like many electronics whizzes in Silicon Valley, he had Tony Stark’s respect for authority too.
At Apple in the late 1980s41 he got in trouble for reprogramming the corporate phone system to make it seem as if CEO John Sculley were leaving his colleagues messages about stock grants, according to John Markoff’s 2007 profile in The New York Times. At General Magic, an Apple spin-off that wrote some of the first software for handheld computers, he and some colleagues built lofts above their cubicles so they could more efficiently work around the clock. After Microsoft bought his next employer, WebTV, in the mid-1990s, he outfitted a mobile robot with a web camera and microphone and sent it wandering around the company, without mentioning to anyone that it was connected to the Internet. The sights and sounds it recorded were beamed worldwide until Microsoft security, which was not amused, discovered the problem and turned it off. Danger, the company that made the Sidekick, got its name from what the robot in the 1960s TV show Lost in Space barked whenever it sensed, well, danger.
This loyalty to Rubin made his team worry about Google’s potential conflict of interest. Why should they even continue working on Android? Apple was now clearly light-years ahead of them, and Google’s top management was clearly behind that effort. Trying to compete with both Apple and their own company with a project that then seemed so inferior seemed like a waste of time.
“Frankly, the iPhone created a morale problem,” said one of the senior engineers. “Some of the engineers actually said, ‘Oh my God, we’re doomed. This is Apple. This is the Second Coming. What are we going to do now?’”
Rubin and those on down had the additional frustration of watching Jobs, in their view, wrongly take credit for innovations that were not his or Apple’s. Jobs was an amazing innovator who had an unparalleled sense for when to release a product, how to design the hardware and
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