Dogfight for Mobile

I read this adapted extract from Fred Vogelstein’s book, Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution, and boy, I am already drooling to read the book.

In 2005, Google was already working on its smartphone project. But two years later, when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, Google felt like the “iPhone was a kick in the stomach”. Here’s how one of the architects of Android (Google’s smartphone OS), Chris DeSalvo, described his reaction to the iPhone:
“As a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’…What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties.”

Google’s plans for the smartphone market were based on three points:
1)      Eventually, technology and bandwidth would allow people to surf on the move, via their phones.
2)     Telecom carriers would have to come around to the phone-as-more-than-something-to-make-calls-with view (feels like such an ancient view today, doesn’t it?).
3)     Microsoft (via Windows Phone) should not be allowed to be the dominant OS on the mobile market. This fear, bordering on hatred, of Microsoft was based on how Microsoft had forced Internet Explorer as the default browser on the world (again a long, long time ago). Who could say that they wouldn’t block Google from the phone, should they take control of mobile?
So what was Google’s mobile approach pre-iPhone? Well, they had a browser ready; their most popular apps like Search, Maps and YouTube were already tailored for the phone; and they could run multiple apps at the same time.

If they had all that, why did the iPhone force Google to hit the Reset button?
“(The) phone was ugly. It looked like a Black-Berry, with a traditional keyboard and a small screen that wasn’t touch-enabled.”
In other words, Google looked at it like engineers, focused on function rather than appearance and usability. And the iPhone, well, was art-meets-function:
“By using a virtual keyboard and replacing most real buttons with software-generated buttons on a big touchscreen, every application could now have its own unique set of controls. Play, Pause, and Stop buttons only appeared if you were listening to music or watching video. When you went to type a web address into the browser, the keyboard appeared, but it disappeared when you hit Enter. Without the physical keyboard taking up half the phone, the iPhone had a screen twice the size of virtually every other phone on the market.”

Of course, Google responded with progressively better versions of Android, and got back into the game. And the rest, as they say, is history war. An ongoing war actually, between Apple and Google for mobile dominance.

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