Battle of the Titans: How the Fight to the Death Between Apple and Google is Transforming our Lives
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. Benchmark Capital, a top venture capital firm, just opened its first office in their neighborhood too.
All this has made Google a rigorous yet chaotic place to work. Especially back in 2005 there were often dozens of engineering projects going at the same time. Many of them had conflicting ambitions. And some were so secret that only a handful of top executives knew about them. The most secret and ambitious of these was Google’s own smartphone effort—the Android project. Tucked in a first-floor corner of Google’s Building 44, surrounded by Google ad reps, its four dozen engineers thought that they too were on track to deliver a revolutionary device that would change the mobile phone industry forever. By January 2007, they’d all worked sixty-to-eighty-hour weeks for fifteen months—some for more than two years—writing and testing code, negotiating software licenses, and flying all over the world to find the right parts, suppliers, and manufacturers. They had been working with prototypes for six months and had planned a launch by the end of the year … until Jobs took the stage to unveil the iPhone.
Chris DeSalvo’s reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. “As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought, ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”
For most of Silicon Valley—including most of Google—the iPhone’s unveiling was something to celebrate. Jobs had once again done the impossible. Four years before he’d talked an intransigent music industry into letting him put their catalog on iTunes for ninety-nine cents a song. Now he had convinced a wireless carrier to let him build a revolutionary smartphone. But for the Google Android team, the iPhone was a kick in the stomach. “What we had suddenly looked just so … nineties,” DeSalvo said. “It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it.”
DeSalvo wasn’t prone to panic. Like many veteran engineers in the Valley, laconic would be a good description of his personality. He’s an expert sailor who had just returned from taking his family on a three-week excursion in Indonesia. He’d been writing software for two decades, first for video-game developers, then for Apple, and by 2000 for a start-up called Danger. There were few software-development issues he hadn’t encountered. After joining Google and the Android team in Mountain View at the end of 2005 and spending a year writing thousands of lines of code out of a utility closet (he likes writing code in silence), he’d moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the week before to help the team integrate a recent acquisition. But as he watched Jobs’s presentation from a run-down office above a T-shirt shop there, he knew his boss, Andy Rubin, would be thinking the same thing he was. He and Rubin had worked together for most of the previous seven years, when DeSalvo had been an engineer at Danger, Rubin’s first start-up. Rubin was one of the most competitive people DeSalvo knew. Rubin