And yet Apple behaves like a corporation under siege—because despite all this success, it is. From the moment in late 2007 that Google unveiled Android—and its own plan to dominate the world of mobile phones and other mobile devices—Google hasn’t just tried to compete with the iPhone, it has succeeded in competing with the iPhone. Android took hold in 2010, and it has exploded in popularity since. To Apple’s astonishment3, there are now more smartphones and tablets running Android software than there are iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches running Apple’s software, known as iOS. In 2012 there was even debate about whether the iPhone was the most popular smartphone anymore. During the third quarter of 20124, some surveys said, Samsung sold more Android-powered Galaxys than Apple sold iPhones.
Apple ended the “who has the most popular smartphone” discussion at the end of 2012, when it unveiled the iPhone 5. But more and more wonder whether this is even relevant anymore. The differences between the two platforms are narrowing by the day. Sure, they are different structurally. Apple makes every inch of the iPhone—the hardware and the software (though the devices are assembled in China). Google just makes the software for Android phones. It allows phone manufacturers such as Samsung to make the hardware. But both platforms now have an equivalent number of pluses and minuses: Apple’s platform is a little easier to use, but it only offers three products—the iPhone, the iPad, and the iPod Touch. Google’s platform offers many more phone choices, and often has the latest phone features ahead of Apple, but it lacks the polish of Apple’s interface. Still, both platforms are now equally available among large carriers worldwide, and, with the exception of Apple stores, they are available for purchase in the same places.
Seeing Apple’s market dominance challenged so swiftly and broadly was uniquely painful for Jobs and remains that way for the company’s other executives. Jobs thought, and Apple executives still think, that Google and the Android community cheated to create their success. They think that Google executives stole Apple’s software to build Android, and that Android’s largest phone maker, Samsung, copied Apple’s designs to build its supersuccessful Galaxy phones. They feel betrayed. Apple and Google weren’t just business partners when the iPhone was unveiled in early 2007. They were spiritual allies—the yin and yang of the technology revolution. This was one of the closest alliances in American business. Apple made great devices. Google made great software. Google’s founders considered Jobs to be a mentor. Google’s then CEO, Eric Schmidt, sat on Apple’s board of directors. They had a common enemy: Microsoft. Together they planned for a long and prosperous marriage.
Then, as can happen in a marriage, the relationship frayed. Secrets were kept. Promises were broken. And the two went to war. When Jobs died in October 2011, there was hope that the dogfight would feel less like personal betrayal and quiet down—that Apple’s new CEO, Tim Cook, would take the emotion out of the battle and find a way to settle it. But if anything, Apple has gotten more aggressive and nasty toward Google since then. It still has dozens of patent lawsuits in at least seven countries pending against the Android community—mostly against Samsung and Motorola (owned by Google). In the summer of 2012, it took the unheard-of step of having its fight with Samsung, Google’s top distributor of Android phones, tried in front of a jury in San Jose. It won a $1 billion judgment, though the damages were subsequently reduced by nearly half on appeal. In September 2012 Apple stopped selling the iPhone preloaded with Google Maps. It replaced the app with one of its own, despite wide consumer complaints that the app was inferior. Apple is believed to be working on a video service to compete with YouTube, which Google owns.
Apple has even begun replacing5 some Google search technology in the iPhone with search technology from its old enemy, Microsoft. Now when you use Siri, the iPhone’s voice recognition feature, Apple’s newest software no longer uses Google search. Instead, she queries Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which has been clawing at Google for a decade over search market share. To get Siri to use Google’s search, you have to specifically ask her to “search Google” before each request. Google is still the default search engine inside the iPhone’s web browser. But for those with long memories, the idea that Apple would dump any Google technology for Microsoft’s—when Microsoft was the bitter enemy of both for so long—is an astonishing development.
Google’s public posture in its fight with Apple has consistently been “Who, us? We’re just a bunch of geeks out to change the world.” But in its quiet, nerdy way Google has fought back ferociously. It defied Apple’s demands that it remove software from Android phones or face patent lawsuits. It bought the cell phone maker Motorola for $12.5 billion in 2012, its largest acquisition by far. It said the only purpose of the purchase was to buy Motorola’s patents. It said it would be easier to fight a litigious opponent like Apple if it owned the company that invented the modern cell phone and all the patents associated with that. That’s true, but the claim hid another equally powerful reason: the acquisition means that Google will always be able to make phones to compete with Apple no matter how successful Apple is with its lawsuits against other phone and tablet manufacturers. The purchase also gives Google leverage in case new challengers emerge.
Last, Google now finds itself doing something most thought it would never do: it is making its own consumer electronics from scratch to compete with Apple devices in the living room. Google has all the pieces not only to hook users on cell phones running its Android software, but to reach them wherever they go, inside or outside their homes.
Usually, the story of two companies and their powerful leaders going at it makes a great magazine piece and little more. Company X attacks company Y. Company Y fights back. One wins. One loses. But this is a much bigger tale than that. It’s hard to imagine a more revolutionary object than the object the two companies started fighting over: the smartphone. The smartphone has fundamentally changed the way humans get and process information, and that is changing the world in ways that are almost too large to imagine. Ponder the individual impacts of the book, the newspaper, the telephone, the radio, the tape recorder, the camera, the video camera, the compass, the television, the VCR and the DVD, the personal computer, the cell phone, the video game, and the iPod. The smartphone is all those things in one device that fits in your pocket. It is radically changing the way we learn in school, the way doctors treat patients, the way we travel and explore. Entertainment and all media are accessed in entirely new ways. That sounds like something Jobs might have said at one of his famous product launches. But it is not an exaggeration.
What this means is that Apple versus Google isn’t just a run-of-the-mill spat between two rich companies. It is the defining business battle of a generation. It is an inflection point, such as the moment when the PC was invented, when the Internet browser took hold, when Google reinvented web search, and when Facebook created the social network. In this massive reexamination of how technology, media, and communications intersect, two of the most powerful companies in the world to dominate that new landscape are in open warfare.
Yes, invariably this reminds you of previous fights among entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, such as Apple versus Microsoft in the 1980s or Microsoft versus Netscape in the 1990s. But the stakes are infinitely higher now. In the 1980s personal computing was a nascent market, and both Apple and Microsoft were new companies. In the 1990s people saw the potential of the Internet, especially in a device that fit in your pocket. But wireless bandwidth was still too slow and expensive. Today, 1.8 billion cell phones6 are sold worldwide every year, and in five to ten years most of them are going to be smartphones. No one knows how big the tablet market is going to be yet, but the tablet is already becoming an important new technology for people to read books, newspapers, and magazines, not to mention watch TV or play video games. In other words, the stakes of this battle are infinitely higher than any earlier struggles.
It’s not just that there is a lot more money to be made and lost in the Apple/Google fight