I bought my first smartphone last year – a Samsung model. Until then I was using a Nokia featurephone. Little did I realize while buying the smartphone, that it had taken a bloodless revolution to come up with the gadget I was holding in my palm. This is the topic of Fred Vogelstein’s Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution (2013).
The book starts with the unveiling of the iPhone by Apple in January 2007. While Blackberry was making smartphones before that and offering email on its phones, the iPhone stood out as an iconic product – complete with the multicapacitive touchscreen, “slide-to-unlock” feature, “pinch-to-zoom” feature, etc. One could play music, email a friend, surf the internet, watch a movie clip, navigate through Google maps, etc. It was a perfect example of what W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne call Blue Ocean Strategy – i.e., it created uncontested market space for Apple.
But the blue ocean soon turned into a bloody red ocean due to competition from Google. Google formed a consortium of handset makers and phone companies and offered its Android operating system for free. Its aim was to boost its profits indirectly – if it could set up a robust platform for mobile phones, then it could make money through increased advertising on this platform.
Vogelstein says 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.”
Vogelstein brings out the quirks of Steve Jobs to the fore nicely. Jobs was suffering from a progressively debilitating cancer, yet he worked hard to design and market the iPhone and later the iPad. In spite of competition from Google’s Android, the iPhone has been hugely successful. At the same time, Android was also becoming hugely popular around the world. Jobs was furious that his earlier protégés – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – had snuck one up on him. But as Vogelstein maintains, with programmers developing apps that work both on iOS and Android platforms, Apple and Google can well coexist with each other rather than one wiping the other out.
When I was doing my PhD in the 2000s, I was smitten by the term “technology convergence”. Everybody thought that this convergence would happen on the PC and Microsoft was gearing up for that. Now convergence is happening, belatedly, on the smartphone and the tablet, especially after the advent of the iPad in 2010.
Vogelstein writes well, though the last chapter was decidedly slow-paced. He tries in the end to give a glimpse of what the future holds, but with things moving so swiftly, the next decade still manages to prove elusive.
The book starts with the unveiling of the iPhone by Apple in January 2007. While Blackberry was making smartphones before that and offering email on its phones, the iPhone stood out as an iconic product – complete with the multicapacitive touchscreen, “slide-to-unlock” feature, “pinch-to-zoom” feature, etc. One could play music, email a friend, surf the internet, watch a movie clip, navigate through Google maps, etc. It was a perfect example of what W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne call Blue Ocean Strategy – i.e., it created uncontested market space for Apple.
But the blue ocean soon turned into a bloody red ocean due to competition from Google. Google formed a consortium of handset makers and phone companies and offered its Android operating system for free. Its aim was to boost its profits indirectly – if it could set up a robust platform for mobile phones, then it could make money through increased advertising on this platform.
Vogelstein says 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.”
Vogelstein brings out the quirks of Steve Jobs to the fore nicely. Jobs was suffering from a progressively debilitating cancer, yet he worked hard to design and market the iPhone and later the iPad. In spite of competition from Google’s Android, the iPhone has been hugely successful. At the same time, Android was also becoming hugely popular around the world. Jobs was furious that his earlier protégés – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – had snuck one up on him. But as Vogelstein maintains, with programmers developing apps that work both on iOS and Android platforms, Apple and Google can well coexist with each other rather than one wiping the other out.
When I was doing my PhD in the 2000s, I was smitten by the term “technology convergence”. Everybody thought that this convergence would happen on the PC and Microsoft was gearing up for that. Now convergence is happening, belatedly, on the smartphone and the tablet, especially after the advent of the iPad in 2010.
Vogelstein writes well, though the last chapter was decidedly slow-paced. He tries in the end to give a glimpse of what the future holds, but with things moving so swiftly, the next decade still manages to prove elusive.
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