Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…I know. We’re going to be talking about Mr. Forestall in a minute here. This must have been in 2006. By this time, John Hanke of Niantic fame had become the VP of the Geo group. Both Earth and Maps were reporting up to him. One day, according to him, he’s at his desk at Google, the phone rings, he picks it up, and it’s Steve Jobs. So many episodes of Steve calling people on Acquired. It’s a quote from John. He says, “Steve Jobs called me at my desk to ask me to help out on a project. He wouldn’t tell me what it was, but of course I knew. We worked closely with Apple to get Maps ready for the launch of the first iPhone which opened up so many possibilities.” At iPhone launch, when Steve Jobs announces it on stage in January 2007, like we said, Maps and YouTube are the only third party apps on the iPhone, except they’re not really. What happened was, they work closely with Google and YouTube on these, but it’s actually Apple engineers and Apple designers that are building the apps based on the back-ends and the APIs from Google. Google has no control. I think about that time, how there was no iPhone SDK. There was no separation between being a platform engineer and being an application engineer as far as iPhone OS went. Of course it had to be Apple engineers because there were APIs that were optimized for performance. You are writing directly, interfacing at a very direct level. I need to be really careful that you weren’t doing anything that would just cause the app to crash every time or worse, something to the operating system level. Love to see if we can find a link too in the show notes. There’s great retrospectives and histories with people. I think on the 10th anniversary of the iPhone talking about how duct tape it all was together in the first version.…

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