Behind the bitter rivalry between Apple and Google—and how it’s reshaping the way we think about technology.
The rise of smartphones and tablets has altered the business of making computers. At the center of this change are Apple and Google, two companies whose philosophies, leaders, and commercial acumen have steamrolled the competition. In the age of Android and the iPad, these corporations are locked in a feud that will play out not just in the marketplace but in the courts and on screens around the world.
Fred Vogelstein has reported on this rivalry for more than a decade and has rare access to its major players. In Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution, he takes us into the offices and board rooms where company dogma translates into ruthless business; behind outsize personalities like Steve Jobs, Apple’s now-lionized CEO, and Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman; and inside the deals, lawsuits, and allegations that mold the way we communicate. Apple and Google are poaching each other’s employees. They bid up the price of each other’s acquisitions for spite, and they forge alliances with major players like Facebook and Microsoft in pursuit of market dominance.
Dogfight reads like a novel: vivid nonfiction with never-before-heard details. This is more than a story about what devices will replace our phones and laptops. It’s about who will control the content on those devices and where that content will come from—about the future of media in Silicon Valley, New York, and Hollywood.
Praise for DOGFIGHT
–Ken Auletta, author of Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
“Fred Vogelstein’s richly detailed, impeccably reported new book is about the battle between Apple and Google for control of the smartphone market. But it’s really a story, replete with betrayals and coups, of the warriors, from Steve Jobs to Sergey Brin, who want to control our minds and pocketbooks. The most poignant line? ‘Jobs thought Page and Brin were his friends.’”
—Bethany McLean, coauthor (with Joe Nocera) of All The Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis
“Every half generation there is a revolution in Silicon Valley that turns the world on its ear. In the 1980s there was the PC. In the 1990s there was the Internet browser. Now in the 21st Century there is the smartphone. In Dogfight, Fred Vogelstein supplies a riveting and previously untold account of how Apple and Google came to dominate this new world—and became mortal enemies.”
—Chris Anderson, CEO, 3D Robotics; former editor-in-chief, Wired; and author of The Long Tail, Free, and Makers
“No battle in the business world is more important than Apple versus Google in the quest for smartphone supremacy, and now Fred Vogelstein has provided the essential blow-by-blow. Dogfight has teeth!”
—Steven Levy, author of In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives
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