Tony Fadell is a key figure within Apple. The engineer left the company several years ago, but not before having definitely contributed to the launch of the iPod and also the iPhone. Something he talks about, among many other topics, on the Decoder podcast, The Verge.
First Apple, then Google, then an investment company
Tony Fadell founded Nest Las in 2011, a company that was later sold to Google in 2014, although the engineer left the company a few years later. Now runs an investment company. On the occasion of his recent book, the interview began with why write it.
“You’re not going to go out and ask 20 people, ‘Should I write a book?’ to ask a lot of people and see what they think. Then I’ll come back and make my judgment based on that. .” It’s like, “No, no, no, no, no! You have to know what you want to do.”
“As far as Philips, or my own startups, or obviously Apple, I was able to create whatever position I wanted because I came with ideas. I came in with some knowledge and said, ‘Here’s what I want to do and this is how I want to do it.” I think a lot of leaders and people respect that, rather than just taking what is given. You go out there and provide value beyond what they do. I hope that was in the book as well. I’m trying to offer value beyond what you would normally see.
Asked about his brief stint at Google, the engineer acknowledges that the Google’s intention to protect the slot machine searches and ads while trying to innovate did not yield the expected results.
“Our Nest team went there thinking of it as a wedding. We’ve had all these discussions over the last few months, like, ‘Are we having kids? How many children are we going to have and where are we going to live? Alright, we’re getting married here and it’s gonna be wonderful.” Everything seemed great, but people were mad at us because Google bought us, not Apple. “How could all those Apple guys go to Google?” It was like, “Look, this is a business. It’s not personal. We have to do what’s right for our customers and what’s right for the platform we’re trying to build.”
“Google said all the right things. Then over time, after the first six months, it became the Tinder Swindler. I was like, ‘What happened? Where are all those cool things that you did you say we were going to have?” They faded away. Over time, we were just a toy in the toy box. When they buy you for $3.2 billion, you’d think people would respect and invest in it. team as a new business area of Google. That’s not how it worked.”
“Apple is a whole other story, at least when Steve was around. There was respect when you were doing things. People took notice and tried to pull it off. That was my mistake. I didn’t realize that Google had been through a lot of these trillion-dollar acquisitions and just dumped them and it was just a matter of cutting their losses, instead of seeing that they’re real people with families, trying to make the right thing in the mission to build this thing.
“They saw it more like dollars, at least from a financial perspective. People inside the company were like, ‘Oh, that’s another project we’re testing.’ At Apple, everything that was tried, at least with Steve, had to show up because it was existential. It had to succeed and everyone had to participate. If you were in something that distracted you, you had to go there install and work there.
Apple has been working on the M1 since 2008
Asked about Apple and innovation, Fadell comments that innovation is, among other things, start developing the M1 from 2008. It’s true that the original iPod went from idea to finished product in just 10 months, but there are innovations that take longer.
“People blame them [a Apple] because he feels that there is not enough innovation. Well, you just said it: M1 processors. We didn’t launch the M1 project, but we launched the Apple processor together when we bought the PA Semi around 2008. That set us on this path.
“It takes years to be able to overtake established companies, but they did it. For me, that’s innovation. It’s very risky to make this change. Maybe they could have done it a little faster, but no one else did. Now everyone is trying to copy them and saying, “Let’s make our own processors.”
“As far as I’m concerned, there’s innovation, but not the innovation that makes everyone angry. Maybe it’s a bit more geeky. It’s okay. Sometimes you have to start at the lower levels and be very geeky.”
“The iPhone wasn’t built because we said we were going to make a smaller Mac. The iPhone was built because we said we were going to make a bigger iPod. time to arrive on the iPhone.”
An original iPhone that was going to run Linux
Fadell also dates back to the creation of the original iPhone, when intended for this to run linux instead of Mac OS X.
“Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president of Apple’s iPod division, and Steve Sakoman, Apple executive and hardware engineer, said at the time, “Mac OS will never work on the iPhone because it’s too big “. So we’re going to put together a new team to create an embedded Linux version of this next-gen stuff.”
“Then Avie Tevanian, Apple’s chief software technology officer, said, ‘Oh, we’re going to take down Mac OS and make it work.’ with the team, looking to build the iPhone processor, and these two guys are going to fight. Avie had all the resources. Jon only had a team of five to seven people, and he was trying to say, “Okay, we’re going to use Linux. It’s going to be open source and we’re going to make it the right thing to do.”
“There was this kind of race, where they were racing against each other. Steve was like, ‘Let’s see who wins.’ retired with Steve. I took over and reported directly to Steve. I also inherited all of Jon’s projects, as well as the iPod and Linux. I was like, ‘I don’t want to be in this war”. It is not a war that I have chosen.” So I said, “Over the next six weeks, we’re going to have a little competition to see which team will win.”
“Avie had also just retired, so it was Scott Forstall, SVP of iOS Software at Apple, versus Steve Sakoman and the Linux team. Over time, there were questions about all the different interoperations that had to happen to fit it into the little device, like “Can you shrink Mac OS down to as much flash memory and as much DRAM as you need?” Then there was the scaling of Linux and trying to build everything from scratch, asking, “Can you build an app environment? Can you run all the parts wirelessly?” It was literally from scratch because Linux in 2005 was really nascent. It was very small. It was bigger than the iPod OS, but very small. During those six or eight weeks, Scott and the other people got together and were able to scale down Mac OS, and they had a lot more technology.”
“They even have tools. It was clear to me that I was going to be able to adapt, one way or another, to this device. It was an obvious decision. I called Steve and I said, “I’m going to kill this Linux project. We will take this equipment and work on software stacks for the lower level elements: communications, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, touch, etc. Then we’ll work over the phone with Scott and the other two engineers running the other pieces of the puzzle. That’s really what happened. Steve was clapping, “Thank goodness. The war is over.” Jony Ive called me and said, “Steve is very happy. Thank you for ending the war.” They were like, “There was this war between the two of us,” and I was like, “I never started the war. I never lost the war.”
