Apple Versus Google
One is a gadget-maker, the other a search engine—but now Apple and Google are at odds. Robert Lane Greene reports on how each company requires a different leap of faith.
As different as they have become, Google and Apple sprang from the same soil: California’s Silicon Valley. Tales from both companies suggest that many of the engineers and programmers at one could have worked at the other: Apple’s Mac-builders playing Nerf-ball tag in the offices in the early 1980s could have been Google’s founders building server racks from Lego in the late 1990s. The sheer number of companies created and destroyed in the Valley, perhaps the world’s most innovative place, encourages a “don’t tell me it’s never been tried” attitude that has driven both Apple and Google.
