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Hi, Megan. Hey, Alex. So you're the lead producer for our series, which we appreciate. And usually you're behind the scenes.
But today we're getting you on mic because you're going to tell us about a certain trip you went on. Yes. Back in December 2019, I took a reporting trip to Nairobi, Kenya. And while I was there, I went shopping for a phone. Okay, wait a second. You can get a phone in New York. So why did you need to go to Nairobi? That's definitely true. But there is something that's really different about shopping for a phone outside of the United States. Something that's really telling about Google's power. Bumble. Bumble.
So I went to Nairobi city center where there is basically an avenue length block filled with technology stores. It's like an outdoor mall dotted with kiosks. And all of those kiosks have phones lined up in big display cases, sort of like jewelry displays. Most cases had like six rows of phones, a dozen in each row. Okay. Everything on the first row is an Android. Everything on the second row is an Android.
Everything on the third row is an Android. Android phones run on a software created by Google. Androids were the majority of phones on sale. Not that they were all the same phones. Several manufacturers make phones with Android software, so you have a wide selection and price range. I want to ask about Android. Like, how many of the phones you sell are Android? Android, wow, there are so many, because nowadays, like, if you don't have an Android phone, you can't get Internet access.
In Kenya, nearly everyone who accesses the internet uses a mobile phone to do it. And that means Android, and therefore Google, is the gatekeeper to the web. That's the key difference between buying a phone in New York and buying one in Nairobi. Just make sure your phone is Android. You will get access to all internet. Sort of the Google dream. I'm Alex Kantrowitz. And I'm Shereen Ghaffari.
If you live in the US, you might think the iPhone is the most popular mobile phone in the world.
But if we zoom out to the rest of the world, way more people are actually using Google's mobile phone system, Android. It powers almost 85% of the world's phones. OK, so how does Google go from being great at one thing, search, to becoming the way billions of people all around the world access the internet? That is a story that actually starts before Android, because this story is bigger than phones. It's the story of how Google built its power, who made that happen, and the friends who Google lost along the way.
And for this story to make sense, you have to remember that in its early years, Google was the David of Silicon Valley, crouching in a ring against very different Goliaths. Back then, Google was fighting to survive. And that sense of itself, as a survivalist, became part of Google's identity, which is how this massive multinational corporation could have been fighting for its life and achieving global dominance at the very same time.
In 2004, a brand new employee was starting at Google, a guy by the name of Sundar Pichai. Spoiler, he becomes the CEO of Google 11 years later. I knew from the first week of working with Sundar, he was one of the most talented and capable people I had ever encountered. I interviewed Linus Upson for my book, Always Day One, and he told me he shared an office with Pichai.
It was an interesting pairing. Upson had been a software engineer at a number of Silicon Valley companies. Pichai studied metallurgical engineering, which is making stuff with metal. Then he got an MBA and did a stint at McKinsey, the consulting firm. His Google interview was a little rocky, at least the way Pichai remembered it, in a 2017 talk at his college alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur. I interviewed at Google on April 1st, 2004, which is April Fool's Day, and
Also, the day Google announced Gmail. Yes, I remember doing my interviews during the day and people kept asking me, what do you think of Gmail? But, you know, I hadn't had a chance to use it. I thought they were, you know, it was an April Fool's joke. Apparently, Pichai didn't screw it up too much, though, because he got the job. But it wasn't clear exactly what Pichai was supposed to do, according to Marissa Meyer. Meyer was Google employee number 20 and Pichai's first boss.
I wasn't sure exactly what to assign him to, and I said, "Sundar, why don't you just attend a lot of meetings for the first week or two, and you can get a sense of what's going on and what areas you might be drawn to." And he did that for about two weeks. He came back to me and he said, "You know, I found there's this thing called the Google Toolbar."
A quick refresher: back in 2000 when you wanted to search, you first had to go to www.google.com on your browser and then type in your query. Toolbar made search easier. Once you installed it, you'd always see a convenient little search box on your browser right underneath that blank space where you type in your URL. So whatever web page you navigated to, Google was always there.
By the time Pichai joined Google, Meyers says Toolbar had 200 million users. But weirdly, nobody at the company was running it. Says a lot about a young Google. I was like, yes, I know it's embarrassing that we have a product that has 200 million users on it and no product manager, but we just have a lot more work than people. And he said, do you think it would be helpful if I worked on the Google Toolbar? And I said, that would be terrific.
Yeah, Toolbar was a really interesting little scrappy project. That's Brian Rakowski. He joined Google in 2002 as its first associate product manager. And of course, he had very Google-y roots. I was at Stanford. I was a symbolic systems major. My advisor was Terry Winograd. The same Terry Winograd who was Larry's advisor. Rakowski is now the VP of product management in charge of all of Google's Pixel phones. And over the years, he's helped launch many of Google's business lines.
He says projects like Toolbar were key to Google's survival early on. Because even while Google was doing well with its search engine, its entire existence was threatened by one big company. We were worried about how Microsoft could impact our business. It was a daily concern, at least for us. Microsoft controlled the internet in the early aughts. In 2002, over 90% of all computers were running Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Meaning all those people relied on Microsoft to access anyone else's products on the web, including Google's. And that put Google at Microsoft's mercy. We were still a pretty dinky company. Microsoft at that time was pretty bold about stating that it was their platform and they could do what they want with it and pretty assertive about their business interests. So it was a worrisome time.
Borkowski said there were rumors that Microsoft was developing its own search engine that could bypass Google completely. And if that happened, there would be no more Google. So when Pichai took over Toolbar, one of his big moves was to make it really easy for users to install it. Google cut deals with other companies like Adobe, so when you installed one of their products, you'd get a Google prompt. Would you like Google Toolbar?
Toolbar was one of Google's ways to fight back against Microsoft's power. Like a quick hit punch from a lightweight David against a Goliath. But it didn't solve Google's problem of still having to go through Internet Explorer.
And that dependency would become even more of an issue, with Google's engineers cooking up all sorts of products that would test the limits of Microsoft's browser. We were building things like Gmail and Maps, and more and more web applications were becoming important to what we wanted to deliver. I mean, Google could ask Microsoft to tweak Internet Explorer for the sake of those applications. But they were pretty complicated.
clearly not interested in feedback from us or anyone else on how the browser should work. It was against their business incentive. So what Google had to do to survive was pretty obvious, according to Linus Upson. I remember at the end of my first week at Google, Sundar, Brian Rakowski, and I were sitting out on the patio on the second floor of building 41 in the central Google campus. And we were talking about like, what were the big opportunities in front of Google?
One clearly was the web and building a web browser and figuring out, you know, how to make the web a better place since Google's core business at the time was all about the web. Sundar Pichai put a team together within Google to build a browser, codenamed Chrome. Chrome was going to take browsers to a whole new level. So what he wanted to do with Chrome was just focus on not adding lots of features, but focusing on three things, basically speed, simplicity, and security.
And if Microsoft was a rival Google would have to vanquish, there was also a friend Google would end up having to compete with, Mozilla. You may know Mozilla now because of its popular browser, Firefox. Google actually helped build that browser. Brian Rakowski and a number of other Google engineers were collaborating with Mozilla on its code. We would walk over to the Mozilla building, which is not that far away, just down the street, and we would spend some time with them. We would figure out what we could help with.
But pretty soon, Google realized that working on both Firefox and Chrome didn't make a lot of sense. Linus Upson remembers feeling torn about bailing on Mozilla. We loved what Firefox was doing. And a lot of the people on the team were longtime Mozilla contributors. And so the idea of going and competing with Firefox is not something any of us wanted to do. So they had to send it up the chain, according to Brian Rakowski, and it went all the way to the top.
Larry and Sergey want to do it. They always want to build new stuff and new technology. But Larry was like, this is a really big commitment. If we go down this path, it's going to be at least 100 engineers to support and maintain this.
And 100 engineers at that point was like, holy moly, that's a big team. Going ahead with Chrome was a huge bet. But if Google didn't have its own browser, it would never get out of its survivalist mode. So Pichai's team got to work on a beta version of Chrome. They shared it with Google employees to test drive. But Pichai never required anyone inside Google to use it.
This is a detail a bunch of people brought up to us. It speaks to Pichai's standards. He didn't want to release anything that couldn't win over his own peers. He wanted the technology to stand on its own.
We knew that we had something good when at some point we said we weren't going to make it, we were going to remove it from people's machines. They had to fix a glitch or something. Murkowski doesn't quite remember, but he does remember the Googlers' reactions. They brought their pitchforks out. It was like, no, you can't take my Chrome away. And then we knew we had something good when people preferred not to live without it.
Chrome was good, but not quite ready for the world. And the pressure was on. Because meanwhile, in 2006, Microsoft released a version of Internet Explorer that swapped out Google with its own search engine, Live Search, which would later become Bing. And look, who knows whether Bing would have prevailed in the long run? But good thing for Google, Chrome was in the works. Two years later, Google released the first version of its very own browser. We never dreamed that we would have more than...
10 or 20 percent share, but we figured if we had 10 or 20 percent share, we would be a credible threat to Internet Explorer. We never dreamed that we would overtake IE. We never dreamed we would become the most popular browser. We just wanted to be relevant. The way Rakowski tells it, Chrome wasn't supposed to be the Microsoft killer. But it turned out to be just that. By May 2012, not even four years after launch, Chrome was the most popular browser in the world. This was one of the great inflection points in the history of the Internet.
Microsoft made a tremendous unforced error and handed the web to Google. Microsoft could have built a world-class browser, but it kept Internet Explorer on maintenance mode to prop up its own suite of software that worked offline, exclusively offline. In other words, when Goliath blinked, David hit it in the forehead with a rock from a slingshot.
But even as Google was winning the browser fight, another bigger battle loomed on the horizon. Mobile. Part of Brian Rakowski's job back then was to look at how people were using Google. On their computers or on their mobile phones. There would be a few people who would be doing stuff on mobile phones. But then quarter over quarter, year over year, you would see the explosive growth. He's talking about growth in mobile traffic. This new paradigm made it
clear that we would at least have to start thinking a lot about mobile. And then thinking a lot turned into, well, we should be mobile first. With Chrome, Google got used to owning the desktop internet. And then it said, well, we're going to need to own the mobile web too. And this is where the fight gets bloody.
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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.com.
Most people think the mobile revolution started in 2007 with the iPhone, but it really started five years earlier. "Everybody needs a sidekick." It started with the T-Mobile Sidekick, which became the status phone of the early aughts when it was finally released in color as the Sidekick 2. Snoop Dogg delivered its tagline in commercials. Paris Hilton had one. Miley Cyrus had one. Lindsay Lohan's Sidekick was bedazzled with rhinestones. It's a real throwback.
And it was also a huge step toward the smartphone, because the Sidekick was one of the first phones with an internet browser. You could Google stuff. You could aim message. Andy Rubin is the software engineer slash entrepreneur who created the Sidekick through his company at the time, Danger. I cringe when I hear that now, because Rubin today is infamously known for the sexual misconduct claims against him. This Sidekick era was years before those allegations came to light. The Google guys were...
Fred Vogelstein wrote the book on the war that made Android. Literally. It's called Dogfight, How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution.
As Larry and Sergey walked around Silicon Valley with their snazzy sidekicks, unclear if they were bedazzled, back at the office, things weren't going so great.
What I remember from working on the book was Larry Page saying that basically we had a closet full of phones that we'd tried to develop, none of which worked. Vogelstein's hitting on an old Silicon Valley cliche here: Hardware is hard. As Google's closet filled with failed phones, Andy Rubin launched a new startup called Android. It was a secretive shop. Not many knew what Rubin was working on with Android, but it definitely had to do with mobile.
So I think in early 2005, Larry Page and Andy Rubin met, I think ostensibly to talk about a partnership of some kind. And during that meeting, Larry said, you know, I actually think we should just buy you.
Larry Page isn't exactly a subtle guy. And so ultimately, they came up with a deal where Google paid $50 million for Android. $50 million for a secretive startup with only six employees. That may seem like a lot, but it was pocket change for Google. So much so that Larry reportedly didn't even tell his CEO about it.
At the time, that CEO was Eric Schmidt. Schmidt was hired in 2001 because Google's investors wanted someone with actual business experience to run the business beside Larry and Sergey. Schmidt is famously referred to as the, quote, adult supervision for Google's early years. And even though he didn't quite supervise the Android buy, it was sort of Larry's passion project, Schmidt would become very important to the story. Because at the same time, another founder in Silicon Valley was glued to his big mobile project.
Steve Jobs, who was, of course, working on the first iPhone. Initially, he knew that Google was working on Android, but he didn't really take it seriously. They're rivals now. But back in 2006, Apple and Google were friends. Sergey Brin and Larry Page considered Steve Jobs a mentor. And this is where Schmidt's big role comes in. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, sat on Apple's board of directors.
In August 2006, about a year after Google bought Android, Schmidt joined Apple's board. He was even on stage when Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007. And what a scene it was. Jobs gives Schmidt an incredibly warm welcome. Now, you can't really think about the internet, of course, without thinking about Google, right?
And for Google, what we have on our phone working with them is of course Google Search. We have that built right into the browser and Google Maps. We've been working very closely with them to make this all happen. We're thrilled with the results and it's my pleasure now to introduce Dr. Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO. At this point Schmidt literally jogs onto the wide open stage, meeting jobs for a celebratory handshake.
"Congratulations Steve! What an incredible job!" Jobs is of course wearing his iconic black turtleneck and jeans, which makes Schmidt really stand out in his bright blue shirt and even brighter orange tie. Jobs retreats to the side of the stage and Schmidt, grinning, starts to talk up the Google-Apple relationship. "So Steve, you know, I've had the privilege of joining the board and there's a lot of relationships between the boards.
And I thought, you know, if we just sort of merge the companies, we could call them Apple goo. But I'm not a marketing guy. Yep, the iPhone was launched with dad jokes.
What I like about this new device and the new architecture of the internet is that you can actually merge without merging. Schmidt said Google and Apple had similar cultures. Both were innovative and fun. They also had their own strengths, right? I mean, Apple was a genius at marketing and sleek hardware design. Google didn't believe in marketing and wasn't very good at it. It focused on software, not hardware.
there's no hint of competition. Actually, it seems like what both Schmidt and Jobs were saying is Google and Apple complement each other. Steve, my congratulations to you, and this product is going to be hot. As a board member, you'll get one of the first ones. Andy Rubin watched Jobs unveil the iPhone from a cab in Las Vegas, and he was less than enthusiastic. This is a key moment Vogelstein wrote about in his book. The entire Android team
was incredibly deflated because they all looked at what Jobs announced and everybody on the team understood that they were going to have to start over. Because the Android team had been building a very different phone.
Andy Rubin thought back then that consumers didn't really care about what their phones looked like. They just wanted them to work better and have super sophisticated software. And the thing that they were working on, which at that point was called the Sooner phone, was pretty sophisticated, but it was complicated.
really ugly and it didn't have a touchscreen. The iPhone set a high standard for aesthetics, for cool factor. It was sexy. It had that touchscreen. Android couldn't compete if it debuted with something ugly. So back to the drawing board. The team adjusted its plans for Android during the next few months.
By the end of the summer in 2007, word trickled out that Google had something big in the works. The tech media was abuzz with rumors of a new Google phone and mobile operating system. Jobs noticed that buzz, and this time he was pissed.
There was a Gawker story that had Jobs calling Schmidt a burning man of all places. You know, the week-long utopian event popular with techies that happens in Nevada? Reportedly, Jobs went off on Schmidt over Google's smartphone plans, right there as Schmidt stood in the middle of the desert.
This marked the unofficial beginning of the war between Google and Apple. Once friends, now foes. Yes, but Schmidt still stayed on Apple's board. He said he would leave the room whenever Apple discussed the iPhone, which must have meant that he left a lot. Even harder to fathom, Schmidt was still on Apple's board in November 2007, when Google announced Android.
Hi, welcome to Mountain View, California. I'm speaking here at Google's headquarters, and I'd like to tell you about something I'm really excited about. It's called Android. That's Sergey Brin in a video announcing Android to software developers. His voice is booming with excitement, right? Unlike the iPhone, Android was not actually a phone. It was an operating system, a mobile OS.
The idea was Google would partner with hardware companies and let them install the Android software on their phones. The first phone running on Android was made by HTC, and it came out in 2008. And it was not impressive. I spoke with Walt Mossberg, who was a Wall Street Journal's tech reviewer at the time, and later co-founder of Recode. It had a big chin on one end because that's where they had to put a lot of the guts of the phone. It had a slide-out keyboard.
And it was just awkward to use. Definitely not as sleek as the iPhone. Actually, it kind of looks like the sidekick. It was caught in the past. Which is maybe why, through its release, Eric Schmidt was still on Apple's board of directors. It takes yet another phone to break that bond.
The HTC T-Mobile My Touch 3G came out in July 2009. No more janky slide-out keyboard. This one had a touchscreen and was smaller, lighter. It looked much closer to the iPhone. The first line of Wired's review for it is, hey, this Android thing may take off after all.
A month after that phone's release, Schmidt resigned from the Apple board of directors. But that resignation was a separation, just a prelude to the divorce. And then in January 2010 came the infamous HTC Nexus One.
Jobs went crazy. He just went crazy. He felt like he'd been stabbed in the back. The HTC Nexus One felt too close to the iPhone. It had advanced touchscreen technology and some other features Jobs considered stolen from Apple.
Like using finger gestures to pinch and zoom the screen. I mean, you know, think about it. If you're Steve Jobs, you're all of a sudden going, "Holy shit, the CEO of Google has been sitting on my board and now he's actually built something that competes with me and looks like he's completely ripped off what I've done." Has he been taking corporate secrets and funneling them to his Android team?
Soon after the release of the Nexus One, Jobs held a town hall at Apple and railed on Google. Wired published some key quotes recalled by employees who chose to stay anonymous. Reportedly, Jobs said, Make no mistake. They want to kill the iPhone. We won't let them. And this don't be evil mantra? It's bullshit. Jobs had a knack for seeing the future. And maybe he saw a future where Google dominated even before Google did.
Fred Vogelstein and Walt Mossberg remember just how angry this made him. Jobs basically forced a meeting with Andy Rubin and Schmidt and Larry and Sergey and took Google's phone and said, you're going to take this technology out. You're going to take this technology out. You're going to take this technology out. Otherwise, I'm going to bury you. I remember a phone conversation with him where he,
He said to me, this is war. This all happened a year before Jobs died. He was battling pancreatic cancer, but he was still keeping up the fight with Google over Android. In 2010, he told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, quote, I will spend my last dying breath if I need to. And I will spend every penny of Apple's 40 billion in the bank to right this wrong.
I'm going to destroy Android because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this. The thing that makes Silicon Valley so interesting, or certainly did back then, is that almost without exception, all the companies were being run by their founders. And so, you know, attacks, business attacks, are not just seen as impersonal business attacks.
They're seen as personal attacks because Steve Jobs built Apple from the ground up. Larry and Sergey built Google from the ground up.
By getting into mobile, Larry and Sergey seemed to have violated an unspoken agreement. It was a betrayal. With jobs low-key called out in an onstage interview with Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the All Things Digital conference in June 2010. Something has evolved and changed in the relationship between your company and Google. Say, compared to the day you introduced the iPhone. Sure. What has happened? Well, they decided to compete with us. And so they are.
And that's it. That's it. We didn't go into the search business. We didn't get into their big business. What Jobs is saying here is Google shot first in this war. Google made us competitors. And in that competition, Google ended on a really critical strategy.
One that ended up pretty much ensuring its global dominance to this day. The only way to win here was to get your operating system on as many different phones as possible. Vogelstein says that's a big part of why Google released Android as an open operating system. So open source refers to the source code that's been developed. You're going to open it up to the world so that everyone can see it. So device manufacturers could just use it for free. Correct.
Hiroshi Lockheimer is one of the founding members of the Android team at Google. And to his point, it wasn't just that Google gave Android to manufacturers to use. Google gave it away for free and let them modify and adapt it. Lockheimer says that open source felt radical to the mobile market at the time. The prevailing...
wisdom, if you will, or just the common business practice was, if you develop an operating system, it's yours. It's proprietary. It's your company secret. It's your secret sauce. You don't want to share it with anyone. The way Brian Rakowski puts it, Google's choice to reveal Android's secret sauce was an idealistic one. He says Google wanted to help the mobile market. We thought that would be kind of a stabilizing force that would
allow a healthy ecosystem and healthy competition without full vertical integration. Open source meant different manufacturers could just use Android and focus on competing in other ways, giving people a wide choice of phones with different designs, features, and price points. This was a big talking point for Google during its Apple war. And there was truth to it, because Apple, by contrast, made a closed operating system, iOS. Only the iPhone can run on iOS.
And because Google set up its own app store, Google Play, developers could release apps for the Android market. Google Play was becoming a, quote, vibrant app ecosystem in the eyes of Hiroshi Lockheimer. And that was certainly something that is not easy for one company to do on their own. And so we feel we've been able to help the mobile industry do that.
And help itself, let's not forget, by ensuring its dominant position in mobile. Also, turns out Android's winning idealistic openness is not all it seems. To understand what I mean by that, let's head back to Nairobi with our producer, Megan. Hey, Megan. Yes, hello. So when I was in Nairobi, I interviewed Liz Arembo, a prominent tech policy analyst. And I asked Arembo what she figures Android's market share in Kenya is. I would put it at 98%, if not 99%.
Like that shopkeeper said, Android gets you the internet. And in Kenya, Android smartphones can be cheap. Let's say the most affordable, cheapest smartphone, that would be like around $15. Yeah, you can get a basic Android phone, but with very limited memory. When you buy your cheap Android phone, you get some key features.
So what Arembo means is in Kenya, for most phones, Google search is the default. And also other apps like Google Play, maybe YouTube or Google Maps.
And here's the thing: this pattern of Google products tending to show up as default in Android phones, that exists throughout the world. And some critics feel that's a problem.
From a strategic perspective, leaving Android entirely open is really not the goal for Google. Susan Athey is the Economics of Technology professor at Stanford Business School. She also spent six years as Microsoft's chief economist. So, good to note, she also had some skin in the game. For years, Athey has argued that Google sets up a whole system of incentives to keep Google products on as many Android phones as possible.
So in the end of the day, everybody just installed Google search products and mapping products and so on. And that enabled them to ensure that their businesses grew. So essentially how Google's critics see it is even though Android started out open, Google rigged the game. Exactly. And then later on, when the European Commission sued Google and reported on their conduct,
They, of course, pointed out all of the factual information that I was aware of. Here's what Athey is referring to. In 2018, the European Union ruled that Google had violated EU antitrust laws. In particular, they said Google had illegally required phone makers to pre-install Google Search and Google Maps as a condition of having access to the Google Play Store.
As the EU's Commissioner for Competition Margarethe Vestager told CNBC: This of course made Android's open source system locked down in a Google-controlled ecosystem, all to pursue a strategy to cement the very dominant position in Google search. The EU fined Google $5.1 billion and ordered Google to end this requirement.
Google responded in a number of ways. And a big one was that in January 2020, Google said it would offer European Android users a choice of default browsers and search engines when setting up their new phones, with Google Search and Chrome being one of several options. So that's just Europe. This past October, the United States Department of Justice filed its own antitrust suit against Google. And buried deep in the complaint was a bombshell revelation.
Google was paying Apple somewhere between $8 and $12 billion a year to make Google search the default search engine on all Apple devices. According to the complaint, this agreement was a top priority for both companies. So much so that in 2018, their CEOs met to, quote, discuss how the two companies could work together to drive search revenue growth. So that was Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
By now, Pichai had worked his way up from toolbar to Chrome to CEO. He'd been praised as a collaborative leader who avoided conflicts. And Tim Cook handled things differently than Steve Jobs. Apple and Google decided that it made more sense for them to partner than to fight. And I think that that's directly the result of Steve Jobs'
I think that Apple and Google would have continued to fight had Steve Jobs lived. But I think Tim Cook took a much more analytical and less emotional view about that relationship.
All those raw feelings of betrayal? That was Jobs' story. It didn't happen to Cook. And for Apple getting paid billions of dollars to make Google the iPhone's default search engine? I mean, if I were Cook, that would be a no-brainer. And what the deal meant for Google was something equally precious: access to a massive, guaranteed user base, which translated to keeping its market power in search.
According to the DOJ complaint, nearly 50% of Google's search queries today come from Apple devices. We reached out to Google for comment about the openness of Android. In a written response, company spokesperson Colin Smith said, quote, Android is literally open. Anyone interested in building a device can point their browser to source.android.com, download the operating system, and use it. You don't have to tell us that you're using it or what you're using it for.
Smith said that all smartphones have pre-installed apps, but what makes Android different is that phone makers can pre-install apps from multiple sources, and users are free to install other apps from app stores or the web. Quote, This open platform is a key part of Android's design and one of the reasons users around the world choose Android. That part is definitely true. Android is the number one choice for phone makers and users in the world, which to me just underscores an important story about Google.
How Google changed from a David to a giant in its own right, even though at each step it was just fighting to survive. Google's moves to grow and keep its market share were motivated by a fear of getting crushed by competitors. And that says so much about the nature of power in big tech. Even when you have gobs of it, you can still feel threatened. Here's Stanford professor Susan Athey.
Whenever there's a technological shift, whoever's got the market power today is going to be trying to find ways to translate its market power today into market power tomorrow. And there's two ways to survive a technological shift. One is to make a better product or share surplus to market constituents through lower prices or sharing more revenue with them or whatever. Basically give people and business partners something they can't resist. The other way is to lock them in
through kind of contractual provisions and restrictions. And the second way is almost always bad.
So it sounds like you're saying that Google is a monopolist in survivalist clothing. Exactly. I mean, it's true that they faced an existential threat, but it's not true that it's good for welfare for them to survive, to maintain market power through that existential threat. You can hear this from Google, this sense of an existential threat. Brian Rakowski told us that without building products like Gmail and Chrome... We would have been relegated to...
probably irrelevant. We probably would have been either stamped out or a very, very tiny, probably becoming irrelevant company if we weren't able to build platforms that allowed us to control our own destiny a bit more rather than being relegated to a feature on someone else's operating system. How do you reconcile that with the criticism of Google being too big? I guess another way of putting that is, did Google actually have a choice? I don't think so. It's a big question.
But it's the nature of the industry. It's the nature of the way these platforms work. Without going one level deeper and making sure that you can control the way in which you're able to build your apps and services, you'll be cut off. At so many points along the way, Google could have been cut off, written out of history. So it did what it needed to do to survive. And then some.
Next week, within Google's empire is a company that could stand alone as its own big tech giant, YouTube. YouTube says the world watches one billion hours of video content on its platform every day. This is a site where internet history is made. Daddy bit me.
Experiences exchanged. When I was younger, I was born in the wrong body, which means that I am transgender. And sometimes radically altered. I'm just gonna get right into it. I fell down the alt-right rabbit hole. We will get into how Google built the behemoth that is YouTube and what unintended consequences came with its power.
Thank you.
Sam Oltman is Recode's editor-in-chief. Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishant Kurwa is our executive producer. I'm Alex Kantrowitz. You can check out my weekly interview series, Big Technology Podcast, on your favorite podcast app. And I'm Shereen Ghaffari. If you liked this episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And send it to your favorite podcast addict friend. Why not? Make sure you're subscribed to hear our next episode when it drops.
