Apple's Spat With Google Is Getting Personal

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
Date: March 14, 2010 9:24:38 AM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Apple's Spat With Google Is Getting Personal

March 12, 2010
Apple’s Spat With Google Is Getting Personal
By BRAD STONE and MIGUEL HELFT
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/technology/14brawl.html>

IT looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Three years ago, Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, jogged onto a San Francisco stage to shake hands with 
Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, to help him unveil a transformational wonder gadget — the iPhone — before throngs 
of journalists and adoring fans at the annual MacWorld Expo.

Google and Apple had worked together to bring Google’s search and mapping services to the iPhone, the executives told 
the audience, and Mr. Schmidt joked that the collaboration was so close that the two men should simply merge their 
companies and call them “AppleGoo.”

“Steve, my congratulations to you,” Mr. Schmidt told his corporate ally. “This product is going to be hot.” Mr. Jobs 
acknowledged the compliment with an ear-to-ear smile.

Today, such warmth is in short supply. Mr. Jobs, Mr. Schmidt and their companies are now engaged in a gritty battle 
royale over the future and shape of mobile computing and cellphones, with implications that are reverberating across 
the digital landscape.

In the last six months, Apple and Google have jousted over acquisitions, patents, directors, advisers and iPhone 
applications. Mr. Jobs and Mr. Schmidt have taken shots at each other’s companies in the media and in private exchanges 
with employees.

This month, Apple sued HTC, the Taiwanese maker of mobile phones that run Google’s Android operating system, contending 
that HTC had violated iPhone patents. The move was widely seen as the beginning of a legal assault by Apple on Google 
itself, as well as an attempt to slow Google’s plans to extend its dominion to mobile devices.

Apple believes that devices like smartphones and tablets should have tightly controlled, proprietary standards and that 
customers should take advantage of services on those gadgets with applications downloaded from Apple’s own App Store.

Google, on the other hand, wants smartphones to have open, nonproprietary platforms so users can freely roam the Web 
for apps that work on many devices. Google has long feared that rivals like Microsoft or Apple or wireless carriers 
like Verizon could block access to its services on devices like smartphones, which could soon eclipse computers as the 
primary gateway to the Web. Google’s promotion of Android is, essentially, an effort to control its destiny in the 
mobile world.

While the discord between Apple and Google is in part philosophical and involves enormous financial stakes, the battle 
also has deeply personal overtones and echoes the ego-fueled fisticuffs that have long characterized technology 
industry feuds. (Think Intel vs. A.M.D., Microsoft vs. everybody, and so on.)

Yet according to interviews with two dozen industry watchers, Silicon Valley investors and current and former employees 
at both companies — most of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs or business relationships — the clash 
between Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jobs offers an unusually vivid display of enmity and ambition.

At the heart of their dispute is a sense of betrayal: Mr. Jobs believes that Google violated the alliance between the 
companies by producing cellphones that physically, technologically and spiritually resembled the iPhone. In short, he 
feels that his former friends at Google picked his pocket.

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