Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution

Fred Vogelstein

Nov 2013 · Macmillan + ORM

About this ebook

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 industry 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 mobile 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, 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 cell 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 and the Internet in Silicon Valley, New York, and Hollywood.

Ratings and reviews

Be the proverbial fly on the wall of many of Apple's and Google's most important decisions and challenges of the last half-dozen or so years, with regards to today's smartphone industry. This great book makes you feel like you're getting a real-time play-by-play of every event that helped shape what Apple's and Google's smartphones would and wouldn't look like, in blow-by-blow fashion. And then the context of where they are now in the big picture, and where that likely takes us. Highly recommended for anyone who, like me, geeks out about modern gadgetry.

I flew through this book. It chronicles in tremendous detail the rise of Apple and Google and the tech industry as a whole throughout the last 10-15 years. It's a great book for 20-some things who were just kids like me when this all started, or even for anyone who wants to know more about both companies. I really learned a lot. Vogelstein is concise and manages to maintain a nice flow throughout the entire book. I rarely meet a book I don't like, but I especially enjoyed this one.

This book is a pretty detailed history of the rivalries between Apple and Google, including a lot of the history of the development of the two dominant smartphones. Very indepth and I learned a lot about the history. Very well written, it wasn't too technical and it was easy to read a bit, come back later and read more. Definitely worth the read if you're a fan of either Apple, Google, or smartphones in general.

About the author

Fred Vogelstein is a contributing editor at Wired magazine, where he writes about the tech and media industries. He has been a staff writer for Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, and U.S. News & World Report. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.