Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution (9 page)

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 1980s 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 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
the software, and how to make consumers lust after it. No one else comes close to his record of doing this again and again. It was genius. But he didn’t invent most of the technology in the iPhone. What made Jobs so successful is that he never wanted to be first at anything. Business and technology history is littered with inventors who never made a dime off their inventions. Jobs understood that a multiyear gap always exists between when something is discovered and when it becomes viable as a consumer product. But when he announced the iPhone, Jobs broke with this practice and declared, for example, that the iPhone had the “first fully usable” Internet browser on a phone.

For Rubin and others on the Android team this was not just a matter of principle. It was personal. He and those on his team at Danger believed that
they
had created the first usable Internet browser on a phone five years earlier, in 2002. Rubin is cryptic but clear when you ask him about this: “Apple is the second adopter of the web standard.” DeSalvo is more direct: “Only one in ten engineers have probably even heard of Danger now, yet many of the things associated with the modern smartphone we did first on the Sidekick.” The Sidekick, not the iPhone, was the first to have downloadable games. It even worked with cochlear implants. “Obviously we were five years too early. If we had launched in 2005, though, we would have owned the world. I guess I don’t think we get enough credit for what we did.”

3

Twenty-Four Weeks, Three Days, and Three Hours Until Launch

A handful of Apple engineers had been worried about the Android effort for months; they knew how envious Google was of the iPhone. But Jobs believed in the Apple-Google partnership, and in his relationship with Schmidt and Google’s founders Brin and Page. More important, Android seemed like the least of Apple’s problems in early 2007. The iPhone was to go on sale in six months, and Apple was obviously going to need every hour to get it ready.

That Jobs’s demo had been nearly flawless was an enormous relief. It was remarkable, actually. Apple had taken a barely working iPhone prototype and, with some engineering sleight of hand, made millions want to buy one right away. But what would happen on June 29, when many of those consumers would line up at the Apple stores to buy one? They would expect the iPhones to work as flawlessly as Jobs made them look onstage. But all Apple had now, in January, were a few dozen prototypes that had been personally picked up at an Asian factory by Apple executives and flown back as carry-on luggage. They couldn’t withstand ordinary shipping, let alone daily use. “We had to figure out how to build iPhones in mass quantity,” Borchers said. Anyone can make one hundred of something. Making a million of them is something else altogether. “How do you build and test antennas, for example? Every unit that came off the production line would need to be tested and characterized because there is great variability in how antennas get built on an assembly line. That affects the radio performance.” Apple was so obsessive about leaving nothing to chance that it actually designed and built its own testing setup at Apple headquarters to address these issues. “Then we brought Foxconn [Apple’s Asian manufacturing partner] in and said, ‘Replicate this five hundred times or whatever it takes to get it done.’”

It wasn’t simply a matter of refining and producing parts that worked right. Key features of the iPhone were far from perfected. Its memory and the virtual keyboard, already one of its most controversial features, still didn’t work right. Touching the letter
e
—the most frequently used letter in the alphabet—often caused other letters to pop up around the keyboard. Instead of appearing instantly after being “typed,” letters would emerge after annoying lags. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had been among the many declaring the iPhone a failed product because it didn’t have a physical keyboard. Apple executives were worried too. They weren’t comfortable using the keyboard either. “Everyone was concerned about touching on something that doesn’t have any physical feedback,” one of the executives said. But Jobs was unyielding on the issue. “Steve’s rationale was just what he said onstage. ‘You put keys on, and now you’ve got these fixed keys that don’t work for every app. Worse, you’ve lost half your screen real estate.’ So everyone understood that this was incredibly important to get right—a make-or-break kind of thing.”

Apple needed to reengineer the iPhone’s display screen too. While Jobs had decreed it would be glass, not plastic, and had found a source for the material the previous fall, it was not as simple a matter as swapping one screen for the other. While Corning supplied the glass, that was only one of many steps necessary to create a working iPhone touchscreen. The multitouch sensors had to be embedded in the glass, not just attached to it, in order to work correctly. But the process of embedding the sensors in glass was entirely different from embedding them in plastic. Glass is heavier than plastic too, so Apple’s engineers needed a stronger adhesive to hold the assembly in place. They had to readjust how all the buttons would work on a phone now made with a stiffer material (glass doesn’t bend like plastic). They had to rebalance the device to account for the difference in screen weight. “It was a really, really big deal,” said an executive involved in the process. “I think Jeff Williams [Apple’s head of manufacturing] found every glass-cutting machine in China to make that happen.”

Lastly, Apple had to invent its own call-testing protocols to get the phone accepted on AT&T’s network. Manufacturers typically just let the carriers do this, but Apple wanted its own data in case of complaints about the iPhone’s call quality. It imagined AT&T using its data to blame call problems on the iPhone when they were largely the network’s fault. It wanted a way to refute that, Borchers said. “So we loaded [several] phones and computers into my VW Jetta and just went in loops and looked for call drops,” said Shuvo Chatterjee. The phones were programmed to autodial certain numbers at certain intervals, with the computers to measure the results.

“Now Apple has a whole process, with special vans, but back then we were making it up as we went along in terms of what needed to be tested,” Chatterjee said. “Sometimes it would be ‘Scott [Forstall who] had a call drop. Go figure out what’s going on.’ So we’d drive by his house and try to figure out if there was a dead zone. That happened with Steve too. There were a couple of times where we drove around their houses enough that we worried that neighbors would call the police.”

*   *   *

Ultimately it fell to Borchers to coordinate and manage most of these issues. As the iPhone’s head of product marketing, he and his team essentially were the iPhone project managers, helping Jobs coordinate and edit the work of the various teams, before developing its entire marketing plan. He and his team were all engineers themselves—Borchers had a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford and a master’s degree from MIT—but their particular specialty was taking complicated engineering details and explaining them in laymen’s terms. If a feature could not easily be explained, Borchers’s job was to ask why it was important to the project in the first place. “We helped decide the DNA of the product, nurtured that DNA through the development process, and then translated that into the message the product goes out with,” he said. “So we got very involved with what features were going in and what it was going to look like.”

Many customers associated Borchers with the first iPhone as much as they did Jobs because Borchers starred in the widely viewed instructional video. No one had ever seen a device like the iPhone before, and Apple wanted to make sure that new users would not feel flummoxed by a device with only one physical button besides On/Off, Volume Up/Down, and Silent/Ringer. As part of the marketing run-up to launch, Borchers had planned to have Jobs tape a thirty-minute video showing customers in detail how to use the iPhone. But at the last minute Jobs told Borchers to do it instead. “We had built a studio for Steve [on the first floor] in Building One so he could just drop down [from his fourth-floor office], do it, and go back to work. But I think he realized it was just going to be a ton of his time. So instead I spent a month doing takes and rehearsals in makeup and getting shaved twice a day and wearing one of Steve’s mock black turtlenecks.” Today, Borchers has the shirt displayed in Plexiglas on the wall of his office at Opus Capital, the venture capital firm he joined when he left Apple in 2009. “You can’t find any others like them, so that’s what the clothespins are for. They pinned them along the back so it fit me because I [at five feet eight] am smaller than Steve [who was six feet two].”

Borchers had ended up at Apple after three years at Nike, and then four years at Nokia, when it was the most dominant phone manufacturer in the world. He’d joined Apple in 2004 to help market the iPod to car companies such as BMW and develop accessories with companies such as his former employer Nike. When Apple decided to build the iPhone at the end of 2004, he was one of the first managers tapped to work on the project. He was well-known among senior executives partially because he’d interviewed for a higher-ranking Apple job in 2002, only to have Jobs decide at the last minute that he wanted an internal candidate. “I remember sitting in a conference room, having Steve walk in, look at my CV, and ask, ‘Why are you even remotely qualified for this job?’ Ten minutes in, he says, ‘Okay, I’ve heard what I need.’ I thought, ‘Well, okay. At least I got one brush with Steve.’”

That rejection turned into a blessing. Borchers came in a notch lower on the organizational chart a year later, earned Jobs’s confidence over the following year, and became a natural to work on the iPhone because of his Nokia background. “So at the end of 2004 I became one of the first marketing employees for the iPhone.”

Borchers’s job gave him great insight into all aspects of the iPhone project. But at age forty-seven, it also gave him more responsibility than he’d ever had before in his life. He’d be a key player at every public presentation Apple would make for the iPhone. He’d help write many of Jobs’s slides. And he’d have a say in every bit of advertising and PR associated with the device. It also meant that by the end of Macworld 2007, Borchers was more tired than he could ever have imagined.

Borchers had been one of the managers responsible for everything Apple did at Macworld, and when he wasn’t spending twelve-plus hours a day at the convention center through the weekend, he was in his car driving the forty miles from San Francisco to his home in Pleasanton. He’d driven all two dozen of the demo iPhones up to the convention center in the trunk of his Acura the previous Thursday—bagged in plastic and sitting in two subdivided boxes one might use for liquor. He’d driven them all back the following Friday night. A car with a member of Apple’s security team followed him up and back while he worried what would happen to his Apple career if he got pulled over or got into an accident. There were no other phones, so had his car gone into a ditch or caught fire, there would have been no iPhone to unveil. “I drove them into the basement of Moscone and hand-carried them up to a special locked room we’d built where we had engineers waiting to unpack them and retest them for what felt like the sixty-fifth time that day.”