1970s when steve job started the company in his garage and from them until the mid1980s it was the hottest company in all of technology, if not the world. One thing i remember but many forgot was the iconic Super Bowl Ad that aired before apple launched their computer and then they were the hottest company on the planet. Host how did google get started . Guest google started in 1988 from stanford. It was started in a dorm room there. And the two men that discovered it wanted to figure out the best way to index the web because that was a problem that people were trying very, very hard to solve but were not doing a good job and they believe they had a way of doing it that no body else thought of. And so in 1998, they started initially by indexing all of stanfords pages and ended up blowing up the network and getting themselves in hot water. And then quickly there after started google and it has been a rocket ship ever sense. What is kind of interesting and i want to circle back, in some respects, apple and google started at the same time. Apple obviously started in the 1970s but then steve jobs got fired from the company in the mid1980s and apple went through a period of say 1015 years where its fortunes declined and it wasnt until 1997 when steve jobs returned that apples fortune began to rebound. When steve jobs came back apple had 90 days of cash left before it was going to auger in. And so in some respect you could say both Companies Started right around the same time. Host well you write that the applegoogle corporate bottle is quote the defining business battle of a generation. What do you mean by that . Guest i think one of the things that make silicone valley so interesting is that most of the companies are started by their founders. As a result, whenever there are fights over things, the fights get nasty and personal quickly because each of the companies has been built from scratch by the person who is running it. So steve jobs takes everything that happened to apple personal and larry and sergio takes everything that happens to google personally and Mark Zuckerberg takes everything that happens to facebook personally. So fights break out sometimes. But when apple and google in particular, what makes it a particularly interesting and defining fight is that you dont just have two companies who are fighting over the future of technology, right . You have apple who has its iphone and ipad and google with all of their android devoices but it isnt just about tonal. These guys are fighting about the future of Media Technology and a future of television, really. It is an interesting evolution that is happening. Silicone valley is starting to become a media center in ways people are just beginning to get their head around and i think that is definitional when you think about it. Host these are content Distribution Companies . Guest absolutely. One of the things i think people are just starting to get their heads around is that apple and google together by controlling the end points of all of the gun owners and tablets that we use because google controls the Android Software and apple controls the Iphone Software and no applications get on the devices without their say so. I think one of things starting to happen is that these guys control so many eyeballs and so many so much money, that people are starting to come to them to help them finance some of the content they want to get out there. So to be a little bit more specific, most people dont think about apple and google as content company or even Distribution Companies, but at this point, the eyeballs they control probably rival those of the studios and the Television Networks and the broadcast networks. And so i think you are going to see Going Forward them not only using this vast Distribution Network but also their Balance Sheet to try to actually get more and more content on their network. The thing that people dont Pay Attention to is that google has 50 billion in cash and apple has 150 billion sitting around so that is about half the value of all of hollywood. So in mew opinion, i think it is only a matter of time before these Companies Start to finance the kind of content we start to consume day to day. I can be a little bit more specific if you want. Host please. Guest i think everybody paid close attention to what happened with netflix and orange is the new black and to house of cards and arrested development. To most it is good shows. But for people out here it is really the first time somebody other than a Cable Company or a broadcast company has distributed a hit show. Netflix is a Technology Company based on the south end of silicone valley. I think apple and google and microsoft and facebook all looked at the success of netflix with its content and thought well, heck, we can do that, too. And i think you are seeing beginnings of this starting to happen at amazon and microsoft and google has spent 3 5 billion with you tube Building Professional channels. And people think about dogs on skate boards or other things you might find on americas funniest home videos with they think of youtube but what is happening is it is becoming the newest platform for professionally produced content as a way of by passing the distribution mechanisms that comcast and the Cable Companies or the broadcast companies have. Apple and google control the end points of our devices and they are going to be big players in that. Host in your chapter changing the world one screen at a time, you write the future of hbo will be a good proxy for how the mobile revolution is going to evolve. Guest yes. One of the things most people forget about hbo is most people think of it as the home of breaking bad and the sopranos and all of the incredible programming that is produced out of that. But one of the things they forget is back into the 1970s when hbo first got going the way they built their business and Subscriber Base was by buying lots of movies from hollywood and then running them on their network. So you could subscribe to hbo and get movies you might not get at the video store or anywhere else. It was a convenient way for people to watch movies they thought of in the movie theaters. So for a long time hbo was the movie channel and that is sounding familiar, right . It is exactly what netflix is doing. It is building up a Subscriber Base that generates money and they can use to finance content. Hbo has content but you cannot get it unless you have a cable subscription. So in order to get hbo, i have to call the comcast or cable guy and i have to subscribe to a bunch of other channels i might not want. The great thing about netflix is you dont have to do any of that and it is cheaper. Hbo is 10 15 and netflix is 8 12. But the most important issue is it is unbundled. So it is going to be in the interesting to watch the rising pressure on hbo over the next couple years as they grapple with in order to compete with netflix and google and apple and microsoft and amazon who might be producing content as well, what will hbo do . Will they put pressure on the Cable Networks to allow them to sell their channel unbundled . Watching how that plays out is going to be really, really fascinating because i think that if the Cable Networks resist and refuse to let hbo go its own way, i think you are going to see tension between hbo and the Cable Networks and i think that will be interesting to watch. Your book is about apple and google but how do the comcast and verizons and amazons and facebooks fit into this infrastructu infrastructure . Guest i thought about that question for a long time. For example, is there a way to distinguish what google and apple do and what facebook is doing and netflix and amazon and others are doing . And i concluded there was. All of the companies are doing interesting things and there is going to be room for what they are doing in the new world. But none of those companies have control of end points. But apple and google do. Apple through their Software Controls all of the applications and content that people see on their iphones and google through its Android Software on tablets and phones and increasingly other devices controls all of the content and software that appears on those devices. It seemed akin to the way microsoft controlled the pc industry in the 80s and 90s that these companies would exercise similar control over the mobile eco systems that was one notch above what everybody else was doing. You know, in the 1990s many of us have forgotten but microsoft controlled all of the software on the pc and especially controlled the desktop. And there were fights against aol and net scape to get prominent placement on the desktop home screen whernever yu turned on your computer. I remember the fights in the late 1990s, the fights that aol and microsoft had over where aols icon would be when you turned on your computer that was controlled by microsoft. And aol was a big and powerful player at that moment. Aol had to save because microsoft controlled the desktop and controlled what people could and couldnt see when they turned on their computers. I think we are seeing that right now. Which is apple and google both control the desktop or the screens that we see when we turn on our phones and tablet and there is a pretty good fight going on to over who is going to be where on the screens when they are turned on. One of things i write about in the book a little bit is that facebook experienced this firsthand in about 2010. In about 2010, it was negotiating with apple on a day to integrate facebook into iphone so you could take phone contacts and compare them with your facebook friends automatically for example. That deal went to twitter as many people will remember. And a lot of people at the time back in 2010 were going what is up with that . Because it seemed like twitter came out of nowhere to get that deal. Well the answer to that question is that facebook tried to negotiate with apple and apple said we dont want do negotiate with you and we will go to twitter. And they will tell you when they negotiated with apple the next time they were more flexible. Host how seriously do these tech super powers take the war . Guest i think they think about it every single day. They try to poach each others employees. They try to figure out ways to beat each other because the reason they take it so seriously is both of them are worried that what is going on here is a platform war. So what happened and in flplatfm wars there is only room for one big winner. So both companies are worried if the other companies wins theyll wind up loosing and loosing really big. This is one of the puculiar Ways Technology works. It tends to create what you might call rolling monopolies. We know the microsoft story with it coming out with windows operating system and by putting it on every pc ultimately wound up pushing apple and the other new operating systems for computers aside. Most of us dont remember, but in the early 1980s there were many different operating systems that exited for computers. And microsoft as a result created this enormious monopoly because people started using windows because everybody else started using it. What people in the economic literature call network effect. This is the history of how silicone valley operates. There were lots of Auction Companies in the late 1990s when ebay got going, but now there is only one auction company. Why . Because ultimate lely ebay camp with a feature lowing sellers and buyers to talk to each other and ultimately got a huge chunk of traffic and people realized if they wanted to get the best prices they go there. So you wound up with a situation where people used ebay because everybody else was using it. This happened with google and online advertising. In 2004, people thought yahoo was going to beat google in the networking field. And ultimately googles Search Engine allowed it to take better than 80 of the market. The last example is probably the most recent which is facebook. There were friendster. My space. There was ning. The list of social Networking Companies out there was large but now there is one and that is because everybody uses facebook because everyone else is using facebook. Apple and google have looked at this history and it is hard for any of them to come up with a you could come up with a compelling argument for why it wont be this way in the applegoogle fight and that it wont end up the way microsoft, facebook others ended up but i dont think anybody wants to take that risk. So the reason they are fighting so hard is they feel like it is an all or nothing game but on top of that the size of the pie is bigger than it has ever been. So this isnt really a fight as i said earlier over who is going to be king of the hill in high tech and silicone valley. You are talking about who is going to be king of the hill in the content industry and that is like 250 billion every year. So the stakes are higher. And both Companies Realize that there is not going to be room for another. Host dogfight how apple and google went to war and started a revolution and the author is Fred Vogelstein who is a continued editor for wired magazine as well. You have a chapter about convergence and it is happening now. Remember it . Guest i do. Host what is the thesis in that chapter . Guest the whole point of that chapter is for many, many years essentially the question in the world of high tech and media was at some point the pc and the television are going to wind up converging and at some point there is going to be one device where we do all of our computing and watch and get all of the entertainment and this debate has been the source of all manner of speculation and business deals over the course of the past 20 years. The most famous convergence deal is the aoltime warner deal which didnt work out well for anybody. But there has been many others. And so over the years the idea of convergence has come to actually get a really bad name and makes people in the media and Technology Industry shutter when you use it and rightly so because they see money flying out of their pockets whenever people get too excited about it. But it is actually happening. What happened is that while everybody was in the media and tech business was still debating whether or not the pc or the tv would be the convergence device you had the smart phone and the tablet showing up and actually solving the problem. And so, the smart phone in particularly allows you to do all of the things you might do on a computer such as email, surf the web, etc. And then if you happen to be on the bus and are board bored you can start watching a television show. It allows you to do work and fun at the same time without changing the way you approach thing and it is always with you. This started to really take off when the ipad took off because the screen is big enough that people in the Media Industry said i can put my magazine there and people said i can put by television there. And all of a sudden people are realizing that by putting all of their content on these devices they are final solving the coast of distribution. You can lower the cost of distribution and you can explode the mount of shows people can watch. Now advertisers can truly reach consumers wherever they are. I think this is turning out to be a much bigger deal than people really expect because i think that ultimately we are now at a point where, you know, five years ago, if somebody said i am going to go watch tv that was an unambigous statement now. But if somebody said that today it generates as much as confusion as it solves because if i am watching house of cards on my ipad it feels like i am watching tv but i am not at all in the traditional sense. So we are moving to a world where the tv is just a we are just talking about screen size. When you talk about tv are you talking about three inch tv or seven inch tv or 25 inch tv and i think convergence of the tv and iphone into this seemless set of devices that can all play the same content depending on what you are dog at the same is a change we are just wrapping our head upon. Host dogfight how apple and google went to war and started a revolution is the title and the author is Fred Vogelstein. You are watching booktv on cspan 2. Television for serious readers. Lynne cheney examines the political philosophy and tenure of president james madison. She talked about the book with her husband dick cheney. This is a little under an hour. [ applause ] [applause]