Dogfight

In 2007, Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt looked like natural allies. Schmidt, the CEO of Google, held a seat on Apple's board of directors, and both companies shared a taste for beautiful products and brilliant engineers.

Vogelstein's book tells the story of how that friendship fell apart in just a few years. The cause wasn't an isolated personal feud, but a brand-new market, the smartphone, which promised to replace the computer as the main screen in our lives.

Whoever controlled the operating system of that device would control apps, advertising, and data for billions of people. There was too much money and too much power at stake for two Silicon Valley neighbors to stay polite for very long.

The author interviewed dozens of executives and engineers from both sides. Because of that, the narrative follows meetings, decisions, and grudges from the inside, revealing a rivalry born out of concrete business interests.

Inside Apple, the iPhone began as a project hidden even from fellow employees. Jobs wanted a device without a physical keyboard, controlled only by your finger, and he set up teams working in closed rooms with special badges and locked doors.

Multi-touch technology was still fragile. The prototype froze, misread touches, and overheated, and engineers slept very little for months while Jobs tested every version, rejected anything that didn't thrill him, and demanded that the whole thing feel magical.

To overcome these obstacles, the company had to solve small problems, like making a screen that wouldn't scratch in a pocket, and huge ones, like convincing a wireless carrier to accept a phone it didn't control.

The result, unveiled in January 2007, showed the real internet on a phone, with no stylus and no buttons. The author makes it clear that this leap came from obsession and discipline, not from a sudden flash of inspiration.

Meanwhile, back in 2005, Google had bought a small company called Android, founded by Andy Rubin. The idea was to create an operating system for cell phones that any manufacturer could use without paying a fortune for it.

The plan fit neatly into Google's strategy: if more people had internet-connected phones, more people would use search and see ads. The system didn't need to generate direct profit, only clear the path.

The first prototype Rubin's team pursued looked like a BlackBerry, with a physical keyboard and a small screen. It was a device designed for executives answering emails, not for the general public.

Inside Google, Rubin and his team were seen as an outside group, small, with little prestige and a tight deadline. Nobody imagined that this crew would end up becoming one of the company's most valuable bets.