On November 5, 2007, Google announces the Android platform, its smartphone operating system which today is practically the one that runs all mobile phones except Apple’s iPhones. The announcement was actually met with some disappointment. For a couple of years we have been talking about the arrival of a Google smartphone, the G-phone. Meanwhile, in January, Steve Jobs had launched the first iPhone.
Instead, that day in November, Google released a press release announcing that thirty-four companies – including Texas Insitruments, Intel, T-Mobile and Sprint Nextel – would have collaborated with Google to develop an operating system based on Linux open source software. The Open Handset Alliance was born and Google’s opponents seemed relieved. That’s all? Steve Ballmer, at the time CEO of Microsoft who hoped to impose his operating system on mobile too, said:! It’s just words on a piece of paper “(but after all, Ballmer went down in history for laughing on TV when they showed him the first iPhone).
While the CEO of Symbian, another alliance that saw giants like Nokia, Sony, Ericsson and Motorola together, dismissed it as “it’s just another platform built on Linux”. In reality, the birth of Android, today we can say it, was very underestimated. Only a few months later the monthly Wired reconstructed how things had really gone and why Android was the operating system destined to dominate the world of smartphones. Long story short, in the spring of 2005 Andy Rubin got an appointment with one of Google’s two founders, Larry Page. He wanted support for the startup he founded, Android, which in fact aimed to create a free open source platform for smartphones, so that any mobile phone manufacturer could choose it. The money would come later. “Android would have had the spirit of Linux and the success of Windows,” Wired effectively summarizes. Rubin wanted Google’s support to find investors and got out of there with Google’s commitment to buy Android for $ 50 million. Android was a brilliant intuition (in 2005 it was not yet evident that smartphones would take the place of personal computers as the main tool to connect).
And it had a flawless execution. Andy Rubin left Google in 2014 accompanied by a bad history of grossly misconduct towards colleagues in the workplace; it was later discovered that Google had long protected and liquidated him with 90 million dollars; and its additional startup, Essential, recently put a smartphone on the market that proved to be a flop.
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