Failure of the Android project: Google in 2007, had to start all over again

In 2007, Google has been working for two years in a secret project designed for a mobile device to derail Microsoft, when Apple announced the iPhone and changed all her plans.

The story appeared today in the magazine The Atlantic, signed by Fred Volgestein. Against the background of the curious secret war between the giants of technology abroad. Heroes are Google and Apple.

In 2005, Google began working on a secret project called Android initiative. Hidden in the wing on the second floor of building 44 Google headquarters, a team of four dozen engineers thought they were on their way to offer to the market a revolutionary device that will forever change the mobile industry.

The prototype was the first Android device without a touch screen and is very similar to mobile phones.

Over the next two years, Google engineers involved in the project worked from sixty to eighty hours a week for writing code and testing. You have been busy negotiating the necessary licences, they flew far and wide all over the world to find the right partner for the project between suppliers and equipment manufacturers. In the last six months of 2006, worked on the prototype, planning for the device by the end of the year. Would be all right if it were not that the January 9, 2007, when Android project are currently in imminent arrival, Steve Jobs went up on stage and unveiled the iPhone.

The response Chris Desalvo (former engineer from the Android team) before the iPhone was immediate and visceral. "As a consumer, I'm speechless. I immediately wanted one. But as Google engineer, I thought: "we have to start all over again."

Steve Jobs introduces the first iPhone was January 9, 2007 year.

For most of Silicon Valley — including most of those who worked at Google-presentation of the iPhone was a big event. Steve Jobs has once again done the impossible. Four years earlier he persuaded the implacable industry as one of the music industry to publish songs on iTunes for 99 cents apiece. Now convinced the wireless carrier to cooperate in the implementation of the Smartphone. Too bad that not everyone took the news with the same enthusiasm. For the team project Android iPhone was a real kick in the stomach.

DeSalvo says:

"We worked for years and now we're scrabbling around in his hands, compared to the iPhone, it seemed suddenly so too ... 90. There we never knew if we haven't seen. "

The full piece is available on The Atlantic. Read it, because it gives you the feeling of an "earthquake" that caused the iPhone in the industry then. And because product that today are well aware that seems so obvious and discounted, scored a real revolution.

iPage Reviews: Get $10 Cashback Now