- ⏰ 7 hours ago
- Julian Russo
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We’ve been hearing a lot about Tony Fadell for a few days, this is explained by the release of his new book entitled Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making, we find inside several crisp anecdotes that had never left the premises of Apple.
Tony Fadell speaks in an exclusive interview
The former vice-president of the iPod section spoke in the Decoder podcast, he confided in the content of his book which is full of amazing little stories of what he experienced while working at Apple, but also of his vision of cultural differences between Apple and Google.
As a reminder, Fadell was recruited at Apple in 2001, he was quickly appointed by Steve Jobs to lead the teams that created the iPod and then those of the iPhone, he had important responsibilities and was able to see to multiple behind the scenes of the creation of some flagship products.
In the podcast episode, Fadell talks about the many Conflicts that there was when the iPhone was created, some developers dreamed of certain things while others found it absurd and thought it would ruin the project:
Jon Rubinstein [vice-président principal de la division iPod chez Apple] and Steve Sakoman [ingénieur matériel et cadre chez Apple] said at the time: “Mac OS will never work on iPhone because it’s too big. So we’re going to go out and build a new team to create an embedded Linux version of this next-gen thing.”
Then Avie Tevanian [directeur de la technologie logicielle chez Apple] said : “Oh, let’s shrink Mac OS and make it work.” I sat there in the middle between Avie and Jon as they did their software business. I’m here with the team, building the iPhone hardware processor, and these two guys are going to war.
Tony Fadell is also the creator of the smart thermostat Nest, a product that became world famous only a few years after its creation. Fadell also tells how he lived Google’s acquisition of Nest for the incredible amount of $3.2 billion in 2014.
According to him, it was a good thing that Nest was taken over by a giant like Google, however he admits that Google was never a company so passionate than Apple was under the era of Steve Jobs:
They saw Nest as more dollars to be made, at least on the finance side. The people inside the company were just like, “Oh, this is yet another project we’re trying.“At Apple, everything that was tried – at least under Steve – had to succeed because it was existential. You couldn’t fail the iPhone because you were cannibalizing the iPod business. be a success and everyone had to be on it. If you were on something that distracted you, you had to get on it and work on it.
This was not the culture at Google. It is obvious that they are successful, with many smart people, and it works for them. It’s very different when you live and die each day by your vision, your mission, your dream. You don’t want to just run to another project because it’s safe and easy; you are trying to do something difficult. At the time, that was not Google’s way of thinking.
According to Fadell, the real difference between Apple and Google is that Apple abandoned rarely and prefers to take his time to advance technologies. At Google, the renunciation is more precipitated as soon as we see that a product or service does not reach the expected profitability or does not meet with commercial success. In addition, the Mountain View firm tends to move faster at the expense of details on certain technologies.