Free Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein Page B

licenses for those portions for tens of millions of dollars. Rubin hoped a big chunk of licensed code would come from Sun Microsystems, makers of Java. Sun had spent ten years building Java as an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows. It typically gave the software away for free, on the condition the user didn’t modify it in a major way. Rubin used it for the operating system on the Sidekick, and it was, back then, a widely used language by engineers coming out of top universities. But Android wanted to modify Java more than Sun would allow. No amount of money seemed able to move Sun from this view. Payments as high as $35 million were discussed. This created two problems for Rubin: Without the Java code, Rubin had to spend months of extra time creating a work-around. Second, it infuriated Sun, which believed Google had copied portions of Java to build the work-around. It ultimately became the focus of a messy lawsuit that went to trial in 2012. Google was not held liable, but Sun, now owned by Oracle, is appealing that decision.
    Finally, Rubin had the enormous task of just doing what he’d promised to do: build a mobile phone operating system that carriers and manufacturers would want to use and that software developers in addition to Google would want to write programs for. There certainly was precedent for it. It’s what Bill Gates did to transform the PC industry and become the world’s richest man. Most of us now just assume that any PC we buy will run Microsoft Windows or Apple OS X, and that it will have an Intel processor running on a certain kind of circuit board that connects to every printer, mouse, keyboard, monitor, and almost every other electronic device. But in the 1980s, the PC industry was just like the mobile industry in 2005. Not until Gates came along and used MS-DOS and Windows to create a platform for developers to write to did the PC application business take off. “I remember at the time telling Andy, ‘This is going to be really hard, really, really difficult. I don’t want you to get discouraged, but I think the chances are low on this,’” said Alan Eustace, Google’s head of engineering and Rubin’s boss at the time. “And then he and I would laugh about that because he was a true believer. It wasn’t that I was a skeptic. I supported the project all the time. It’s just that we both knew it was going to be hard.”
    Some of the issues in building Android were similar to the ones Apple faced. Few people had put an operating system as sophisticated as Android on a phone chip. Meanwhile, all the testing had to be done on simulators because the actual chips and displays Rubin wanted to put on the Dream phone weren’t going to be manufactured for another year. But Google was in an even worse position than Apple to take on these challenges. At Apple the iPhone had nearly brought the company to its knees, but at least Apple was used to building things that consumers wanted to buy. Google had no such experience. Google made money selling advertising. Everything else it built—web software—it gave away for free. It had no fancy industrial-design division comparable to Apple’s. Indeed, the idea of a finished product of any sort was anathema to Googlers. To them the beauty of building web software was that it was never finished. When a feature was mostly done, Google would release it, then refine it over time based on consumer usage with updates to their servers.
    Google also viewed marketing with the kind of contempt only an engineer could muster. If a product was good, word of mouth on the web would get people to use it. If it was not good, people would not use it. The idea that Google might be selling more than just a cool phone, but amorphous feelings of satisfaction and self-confidence—the way Jobs sold Apple’s devices—seemed silly. This thinking was firmly rooted in Google’s DNA as a corporation. In Google’s early years executives had hired the famed consultant Sergio