Ben: Welcome back to Episode 20 of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions. I’m Ben Gilbert.

Ben：欢迎回到Acquired第20期节目，这是一档专注于科技行业并购的播客节目。我是Ben Gilbert。

David: I’m David Rosenthal.

David：我是David Rosenthal。

Ben: And we are your hosts. Today’s episode is one that’s been coming for a long, long time. It's a cornerstone of all of computing today – Google’s 2005 acquisition of Android.

Ben：我们是本节目的主持人。今天这期节目我们期待已久，它讲述的是当今整个计算世界的基石之一——Google在2005年收购Android的故事。

David: I’m speechless.

David：我简直说不出话来。

Ben: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, 2005, when you think about the numbers it doesn’t feel that long ago, but when you think about the first time you saw an Android phone and heard about what Google is working on, it seems like the iPhone hadn’t come out yet, right?

Ben：是啊，挺有意思的。2005年，听起来似乎没那么遥远，但当你回想起第一次见到Android手机、第一次听说Google在开发这东西时，那时候iPhone都还没发布，对吧？

David: Yeah. This was before. iPhone was just a glimmer in Steve Job’s eye.

David：对，那是在iPhone诞生之前。那时候iPhone还只是Steve Jobs脑海里的一个火花。

Ben: Yeah, all right. So to all of our new listeners, welcome. We were featured on New and Noteworthy in iTunes over the past, looks like a week or two and about doubled our subscriber base. So, thanks so much for everyone trying us out and giving us a shot. I think what I want to do is go over the format of the show since a lot of you are new and talk about what we’ll cover today and kind of reviewing and grading Google’s Android acquisition.

Ben：是的。首先欢迎所有新听众的加入。我们最近一到两周被iTunes推荐为“新鲜与值得关注”，我们的订阅人数几乎翻倍。非常感谢大家的关注和尝试。我想先介绍一下节目的结构，毕竟有很多新听众，然后聊聊我们今天的主题——回顾并评分Google收购Android这笔交易。

So the first thing is something sort of newish that we’re trying called Community Showcase. We felt it was important since we have so many listeners who are working on projects and building things, a lot of entrepreneurs, and we like to on each episode talk about something that one of those people is working on. So we’ll do our Community Showcase, then we go into Acquisition History and Facts where David takes us through…

我们首先会介绍一个新环节，叫做“社区展示”。我们觉得这个环节很重要，因为我们有很多听众正在做项目、创业，我们希望每期都能展示一位听众正在做的事情。然后我们会进入“并购历史与事实”环节，由David来带我们回顾……

David: What actually happened.

David：事情的真实经过。

Ben: Yeah.

Ben：好的。

David: What happened and when.

David：接下来我们会讲讲这笔收购是怎么发生的，发生在什么时候。

Ben: Then we get into the acquisition category where we decide if it's a people acquisition, technology, product, business line. We recently added asset to our categories or the ever-so-famous –

Ben：然后我们会对这笔收购进行分类，比如它是一次人才收购、技术收购、产品收购、业务线收购，最近我们还新增了一个“资产收购”类别，或者还有最常见的那种——

David: All-encompassing other.

David：包罗万象的“其他”类别。

Ben: Yes. Then we talk about what would have happened otherwise, what tech themes this illustrates for us. We then formally give the grade of our acquisition from the episode. Then we have some follow-ups and a section called The Carve Out. This is where David and I grab something from our lives that we’ve seen whether a book or a piece of software or anything in the media that we think is either related or completely unrelated to the topic at hand.

Ben：没错。之后我们会讨论，如果这笔收购没有发生，会发生什么？它体现了哪些技术趋势？接着我们会正式给出我们对这笔收购的评分。然后是后续环节，还有一个叫“The Carve Out”的板块，在这个环节里，David和我会分享我们生活中看到的一些东西，比如一本书、一款软件，或者媒体上任何我们觉得有意思的内容，不管它是否与本期话题相关。

David: Just something fun that strikes our fancy. The other thing that we sometimes do now is Hot Takes. If something big in the M\&A world or otherwise happened in the past week or two, we’ll do a quick discussion.

David：就是一些我们感兴趣、觉得有趣的东西。另外我们现在有时候还会加个“热点速评”环节，如果过去一两周内在并购界或其他领域发生了大事件，我们也会快速聊聊。

Ben: We will

Ben：我们会的。

David: So that’s the show.

David：这就是我们节目的整体结构。

Ben: Indeed. All right, so our community showcase this week. Listener Matt – I might butcher this – Morgante released a book called Patagonia on a Budget. It's on Product Hunt right now. If you search on Amazon for Patagonia on a Budget, you can find it. And it’s how to have your adventure in Patagonia on \$3 a day. There’s a ton of cool photographs in there. I should go pick up a copy. It looks super cool.

Ben：没错。那么本周的“社区展示”环节。听众 Matt——我可能会念错他的姓——Morgante 出版了一本书，叫《Patagonia on a Budget》。目前正在 Product Hunt 上发布，如果你在亚马逊上搜索《Patagonia on a Budget》，也能找到。这本书讲的是如何用每天3美元的预算在巴塔哥尼亚进行探险。里面有很多很酷的照片。我应该去买一本看看，看起来非常棒。

David: Patagonia is awesome. That brings us to, also for our new listeners, our Slack community. So we have a community channel on Slack and if you’d like to join it, there’s lots of great discussion going on on there. Just go to our website Acquired.fm, and there’s a signup form there. Then, you can hang out with the community throughout the week.

David：Patagonia太棒了。顺便说一下，也跟我们新听众介绍一下，我们还有一个 Slack 社区。如果你想加入，我们在上面有很多非常精彩的讨论。只需要访问我们的网站 Acquired.fm，那里有一个注册表格。注册之后你就可以一整周都和社区里的朋友们互动交流。

Ben: Yeah. And if you want us to show off what you’re working on, drop a link in and we’ll check it out.

Ben：对了，如果你也想让我们展示你正在做的项目，欢迎在社区里发个链接，我们会看一看。

So, on to this week’s topic. David, you want to hit it with the acquisition history and facts?

那么，进入本周主题。David，你来介绍一下这笔收购的历史和背景吧？

David: As always, Ben. So, Android. As Ben mentioned, this one has been a while coming. We’ve had a lot of requests for this. We’ve been saving it and we felt it was time to finally dive in here. There is so much to unpack here, so we’ll get into it.

David：当然，Ben。说到 Android，就像 Ben 提到的，我们早就想做这一期了。听众请求了很多次，我们也一直在“存货”中，觉得现在是时候好好聊一聊了。这其中的信息非常丰富，我们这就开始。

October 2003, Android is a startup company, just founded in Palo Alto by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears and Chris White. Andy Rubin, the CEO, was basically born to start this company. So Andy’s career started at Carl Zeiss, the camera technology and camera lens manufacturing company. Then he moved to Apple. At Apple, he met a bunch of folks. This was during the John Scully era.

2003年10月，Android 这家公司刚刚在帕洛阿尔托成立，创始人是 Andy Rubin、Rich Miner、Nick Sears 和 Chris White。CEO Andy Rubin 几乎就是为创建这家公司而生的。他的职业生涯开始于蔡司公司（Carl Zeiss），那是一家做相机技术和镜头制造的公司。后来他去了苹果公司，在那里认识了很多人，那时候正值 John Scully 执掌苹果的时代。

Ben: Wow, I did not know he was at Apple.

Ben：哇，我还真不知道他在苹果工作过。

David: He was at Apple, yup. There for a couple of years. He and a bunch of other people spun off from Apple and started a company called General Magic, which not a lot of people remember, but this was a spin-off from Apple, actually went public itself. They never launched a product but what they were doing was they were building essentially a tablet, like a personal communicator, sort of a Palm competitor. A lot of that tech, I believe, ended up in the Newton at Apple.

David：是的，他确实在苹果工作过，有好几年。他和一些人从苹果出来创办了一家公司，叫 General Magic，很多人可能没听说过，但它实际上是苹果的一个衍生公司，甚至还自己上市了。他们从未真正推出过一款产品，但当时他们的目标是开发一款类似平板的个人通信设备，有点像是 Palm 的竞争对手。我认为他们开发的一些技术后来被用在了苹果的 Newton 设备上。

Ben: They went public?

Ben：他们上市了？

David: It was a public company, yup, and then it ended up going bankrupt.

David：是的，是一家上市公司，最后破产了。

Ben: Wow.

Ben：哇。

David: It was super ambitious at the time. I believe also some of the technology that they developed there became the standard for USB. A lot of really cool stuff happened there.

David：当时他们的目标非常雄心勃勃。我记得他们开发的一些技术后来还成为了 USB 的标准。在那里诞生了很多非常酷的技术成果。

So, he went from Apple to General Magic and then, a bunch of General Magic alums went and started a company called WebTV, which you probably do remember. WebTV was part of… this was in the kind of mid to late ‘90s, a vision that a lot of people in technology had at the time that the internet was not going to happen on computers in a big way, it was going to happen on your TV.

于是他从苹果去了 General Magic，后来 General Magic 的一些前员工又一起创办了一家公司叫 WebTV，你可能还记得。WebTV 属于九十年代中后期的一种技术愿景，当时很多人都认为互联网不会主要发生在电脑上，而是会出现在你的电视上。

Ben: That’s right.

Ben：没错。

David: So this was a set top box, with your cable box.

David：所以这其实是一个与有线电视盒子配套的机顶盒。

Ben: This is in the era that Microsoft was making the bet that they should do MSNBC like a technology-enabled television channel joint venture.

Ben：那时候正是微软押注 MSNBC 的年代，他们想搞一个结合科技的电视频道合资项目。

David: Yup, this is the AOL Time Warner days, like it's all new media, old media. Like, it’s the eyeball economy.

David：没错，那是 AOL 和时代华纳合并的年代，新媒体与传统媒体混合的时期，一切都在追求“眼球经济”。

So WebTV ends up getting acquired by Microsoft. Andy and the team go up to Seattle, worked in Microsoft. I don't know if they actually ever came up to Seattle. But they built Microsoft TV which as we know is an abject failure.

最后 WebTV 被微软收购了。Andy 和他的团队去了西雅图，在微软工作。我不确定他们是不是真的去了西雅图，但他们当时打造了 Microsoft TV，众所周知，这个项目最终失败了。

But shortly thereafter, Andy leaves and he starts a new company called Danger. So Danger was founded in the late ‘90s, I believe, after Andy left Microsoft. They made a little device called the Sidekick. RIM already existed, so there were Blackberry’s out there but this was the first consumer-focused smartphone really.

不久之后，Andy 离开了微软，创办了一家新公司叫 Danger。Danger 是在九十年代末创立的，应该是在 Andy 离开微软之后。他们当时推出了一款叫 Sidekick 的小设备。当时 RIM 已经存在了，也就是黑莓手机已经问世，但 Sidekick 算是第一款真正面向消费者市场的智能手机。

Ben: Yeah, and it had like celebrities where it had a cool factor because they would show they’re Danger and, you know, photo shoots. This was a thing. You wanted to have one of these.

Ben：对啊，而且还有一些名人加持，显得特别酷，因为他们在拍照时会展示自己的 Danger 手机。这真的是个潮流单品，大家都想要一个。

David: I remember the first time that I started hearing about the Sidekick and Danger was watching Entourage.

David：我记得我第一次听说 Sidekick 和 Danger，是在看美剧《Entourage》（明星伙伴）的时候。

Ben: Oh, man.

Ben：哈哈，说得没错。

David: It was like everybody on Entourage had a Sidekick. I think there’s actually an episode where there was a plot point that Turtle gets a Sidekick. Can’t remember exactly.

David：剧里的每个人好像都有一部 Sidekick。我记得有一集剧情里还特地讲到 Turtle 拿到了一部 Sidekick，虽然细节我记不清了。

Ben: It’s so recognizable too, the way that it spun out. I mean, the industrial design was crazy, unique and super cool.

Ben：而且它那个弹出旋转的设计真的是一眼就能认出来。工业设计简直疯狂，独一无二，非常酷。

David: Yup. There was very little on the market. Like I said, there were smart phones, they existed, but this was like the Windows Mobile days, there was Blackberry.

David：对，当时市场上几乎没什么类似产品。就像我说的，虽然已经有智能手机，但那还是 Windows Mobile 的时代，还有黑莓。

Ben: It’s for business people.

Ben：那种手机都是为商务人士准备的。

David: It was for business people. Then the Sidekick comes out and it’s the first time like, “Oh, we can bring this technology to consumers as well.”

David：那时候的智能手机都是为商务人士准备的。直到 Sidekick 问世，才第一次让人意识到：“哦，我们也可以把这项技术带给普通消费者。”

So, Andy was the CEO of Danger and then he ends up leaving relatively early on in the life of the company. Oh, by the way, supposedly, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were huge Sidekick users as well. So he ends up leaving and starting a new company that he calls Android. The vision for the Android is –

所以，Andy 是 Danger 的 CEO，但他在公司早期就离开了。哦，顺带一提，Larry Page 和 Sergey Brin 据说也是 Sidekick 的超级用户。之后 Andy 离开，创办了一家新公司，名字叫 Android。Android 的最初愿景是——

Ben: This is post acquisition?

Ben：这是在 Danger 被收购之后吗？

David: No, no, this is pre-acquisition of Danger. Danger doesn’t end up getting acquired by Microsoft until 2008.

David：不不，这发生在 Danger 被收购之前。Danger 是到 2008 年才被微软收购的。

Ben: Oh, wow.

Ben：哦，原来如此。

David: Much later. But in 2003, Andy leaves and starts Android. Whereas Danger was sort of a full stack company, they were making the hardware, they were making the software that went on the Sidekicks. They were dealing with carriers, everything.

David：那是很晚之后的事了。但在 2003 年，Andy 离开后创办了 Android。和 Danger 这种“全栈”公司不同，Danger 负责硬件、软件、甚至和电信运营商打交道，包办一切。

Android is an operating system company. They want to take Linux and essentially make it into an operating system capable of running on mobile devices. We now know Android runs on so many devices today. The first target market that they’re going to go after is digital cameras.

而 Android 是一家操作系统公司。他们希望在 Linux 的基础上开发出适用于移动设备的操作系统。如今我们知道 Android 被部署在无数设备上。但当时他们最初锁定的目标市场其实是数码相机。

Ben: That’s right, that’s right. I remember reading that and I think what they assessed is that it’s not a big enough market.

Ben：没错，我记得读到过这个。他们后来判断那个市场不够大。

David: Yeah. Which is interesting because it was a huge market at the time. This was 2004. Everybody had the point-shoots and it will be interesting to know like what process they went through in deciding that that wasn’t big enough. But fortunately, they made the right call and it quickly pivot into focusing the device on mobile phones.

David：是啊，这其实挺有趣的，因为当时（2004年）数码相机市场其实很大。大家人手一台卡片机。如果能了解他们是怎么得出“市场不够大”的结论会很有意思。但幸运的是，他们做出了正确的选择，迅速转向把操作系统用于手机设备。

Ben: I wonder. The hindsight’s 20/20 but I don’t think it was apparent in 2003 that point-and-shoots would go away and become part of phones. Is there a world where you see that maybe the other way around that you’re like, we should build a really great camera because at some point cellular technology will become lightweight enough that we can put it in.

Ben：我在想啊，事后看当然一切都清楚了，但在 2003 年时，大家可不会想到卡片相机会消失、变成手机的一部分。有没有可能当时他们反过来想过，“我们要不要做一台非常棒的相机？反正将来蜂窝通信技术会变得更轻便，到时候我们可以把它也整合进去”？

David: Into the camera.

David：把蜂窝通信功能整合进相机里。

Ben: Yeah.

Ben：对。

David: It would certainly have been hard to imagine cameras on phones to the extent they even existed then getting good enough that you could actually take real pictures on it.

David：在当时，确实很难想象手机上的摄像头有一天会好到可以真正拍出像样的照片。

Ben: Right. I don’t think I had a camera phone until 2005 or 2006.

Ben：对，我记得我好像到 2005 或 2006 年才有了带摄像头的手机。

David: Yup, later than this time period.

David：是的，那已经是这段时间之后了。

Ben: They were just horrendous.

Ben：而且那些摄像头实在太糟糕了。

David: Oh, they were awful. Even the first iPhone in 2007 like the camera was part of it but it wasn’t like that was a big selling point and contrast that now with how huge the camera is on the iPhone.

David：是啊，真的很差。即便是 2007 年推出的第一代 iPhone，虽然配备了摄像头，但那并不是它的主要卖点。对比一下现在，iPhone 的摄像头几乎是最大的卖点之一。

Ben: I literally just pre-ordered a form factor that I don’t want because the camera is better. The Plus is too big for me. I had this weird realization that, “Wow, I use this thing more as a camera than a phone.”

Ben：我刚刚才预订了一个我其实不喜欢的机型版本，只因为它的相机更好。Plus 对我来说太大了。我突然意识到一个很奇怪的事情：“哇，我用这东西更多是当相机，而不是电话。”

David: Maybe Andy and team were more right than they thought at the time. Anyway, getting back on track. So, as far as we know, they never raised any venture capital at Android. But Steve Perlman who had been the CEO of WebTV and who had been at General Magic with Andy, and Andy had worked for him at both places, at one point there’s in the lower of pre-Google Android, apparently Andy was running low on cash and Steve shows up at the office at Android with an envelope with $10,000 in cash in it and he just gives it to Andy.

David：也许 Andy 和他的团队当年比他们自己预料的还要有远见。好，回到正题。据我们所知，Android 在被谷歌收购前其实从未融资。但 Steve Perlman——他是 WebTV 的 CEO，也曾和 Andy 一起在 General Magic 工作，Andy 在这两个地方都为他效力过——有一次在 Google 收购 Android 之前，Andy 手头资金短缺，Steve 就亲自来到 Android 的办公室，带来一个信封，里面有一万美元现金，直接交给了 Andy。

Ben: And he refuses to take a share in the company. Andy tries to give him shares for it and he says “No, no, this is just for you.”

Ben：而且他拒绝接受公司股份。Andy 想给他股份，他说：“不，不，这只是给你的。”

David: No, he is just giving him the cash. What a good friend.

David：是啊，他就是纯粹给他钱。多好的朋友啊。

Ben: I know.

Ben：是啊。

David: It’s awesome. Steve, will you be our friend? So that happens, they’re working away on this operating system and as we mentioned a minute ago, Larry and Sergey had been big Sidekick fans. They had actually met Andy back in the day when he was working on Danger.

David：太棒了。Steve，要不要来做我们的朋友？总之，就这样，他们继续埋头开发操作系统。我们刚才也提到过，Larry（Page）和 Sergey（Brin）是 Sidekick 的忠实粉丝。他们早年在 Andy 还在 Danger 工作时就认识了他。

July 2005 comes along and Google ends up just acquiring Android before they’ve shipped anything, they’re a long way away from shipping anything. Deal term is not announced. This was a small team, hadn’t raised any venture in Palo Alto. Rumored to be about $50 million. What’s interesting is that many years later, David Lawee who at one point had Google’s corporate development in 2010, he’s being interviewed and he calls this Google’s “best deal ever”.

2005 年 7 月，谷歌收购了 Android，当时他们还没有发布任何产品，距离发布仍遥遥无期。收购条款没有公开。这是一支来自帕洛阿尔托的小团队，从未获得过风险投资。据传这笔交易金额约为 5000 万美元。有意思的是，多年以后，谷歌企业发展负责人 David Lawee（2010 年任职）在接受采访时称这是谷歌“史上最划算的一笔交易”。

So they've acquired this company, it’s Andy and team, they’re working on this operating system. Immediately, you know, Google had just gone public a year before, lots of rumors start circling about what Google is up to here. You know, are they working on the G phone, that’s kind of the like the G Drive that we talked about with Google Docs, the Writely acquisition. For years people are speculating “What is going on here? What is going on here?” and there’s no G phone. Andy and team are working away for years. So, pretty much nothing happens until 2007.

所以他们收购了这个公司，由 Andy 和他的团队继续开发操作系统。与此同时，谷歌刚刚在一年前上市，坊间立刻开始流传各种谣言，猜测谷歌到底在干什么。人们在猜他们是不是在做一款 “G phone”，就像我们之前提到的 G Drive 和收购 Writely 那样。多年里，外界都在猜：“到底在做什么？到底在做什么？”但一直没有 G phone 的踪影。Andy 和团队一直在幕后默默开发。直到 2007 年，事情才开始真正发生变化。

Then in January 2007, the world changes. Steve Jobs announces the iPhone.

然后到了 2007 年 1 月，世界彻底变了。Steve Jobs 发布了 iPhone。

Ben: The breakthrough internet communications device where nobody really understands what he’s talking about.

Ben：那款“突破性的互联网通信设备”，大家当时根本听不懂他在说什么。

David: It’s a phone, it’s an iPod, it’s a breakthrough internet communications device. One of the best product launches and speeches and presentations of all time.

David：这是一部手机，这是一个 iPod，这是一台突破性的互联网通信设备。这是有史以来最精彩的产品发布、演讲和展示之一。

Ben: Yup.

Ben：没错。

David: So that happens in January 2007. Meanwhile, Andy and team within Google had been working on the operating system and they’d been working with hardware partners about what the phones that they would ultimately bring to market would look like and they’re working with HTC. They had a prototype and it looked a lot like the Palm Trio, if you remember that. It was not a touch screen. It had Blackberry-like keys on it. I’m not sure if it had a stylus, it may. So then they watched the iPhone announcement which at the time it was amazing like I lined up for the first iPhone, like I couldn’t wait to get it.

David：这场发布发生在 2007 年 1 月。与此同时，Andy 和他在谷歌的团队一直在开发这个操作系统，并与硬件合作伙伴探讨他们最终要推出的手机会是什么样子，当时他们正在和 HTC 合作。他们已经有了一个原型，看起来非常像 Palm Trio，你还记得那款吗？那不是触屏设备，有点像 Blackberry 的实体按键。我不确定有没有触控笔，也可能有。然后他们看了 iPhone 的发布会，当时简直震撼，我还排队买第一部 iPhone，我等不及要拿到它了。

Ben: I lined up for the first iPhone and didn’t buy one. I was young and did not have any money and it was like I couldn’t pay for the data plan, but I wanted to be part of it.

Ben：我也排队买第一部 iPhone，但最后没买。我那时太年轻了，没什么钱，甚至连数据流量套餐都付不起，但我就是想参与其中。

David: That’s amazing. I was lucky I had just graduated from college when it came out that summer literally and this was the first cellphone I bought. Like I went off my parent’s plan, got my phone plan just so I could get an iPhone.

David：太有意思了。我那时刚刚大学毕业，那年夏天刚好 iPhone 上市，这是我买的第一部手机。我脱离了爸妈的家庭套餐，自己办了一个套餐，就为了买 iPhone。

Ben: That’s right because they launched special iPhone plans that didn’t include family plans.

Ben：对，因为他们推出的是专属 iPhone 套餐，不包含家庭计划。

David: Because it was – we’ll get back to this – it was an exclusive with AT&T. Which becomes quite important later. So this happened and consumers were dying to get this thing. I think people were calling it the “god phone” but this is also the time Steve Ballmer was saying like, you know, literally laughing about it. A lot of corporate tech and big companies are really discounting the transformative power that the iPhone is about to have here.

David：因为那是——我们之后会再说——是和 AT&T 独家合作的。这一点后来变得非常关键。发布后消费者们迫不及待想要拥有它。我记得那时人们甚至称它为“上帝手机”。但与此同时，Steve Ballmer（时任微软 CEO）却在嘲笑它。很多大型科技公司和企业完全低估了 iPhone 即将带来的颠覆性影响。

Ben: Meanwhile, there’s a great story about a bunch of RIM employees that were sitting around that watched the keynote and said it was fake. They were like, “There’s literally no way to do this. That, we’ve tried. You can’t get scroll performance like that. You can’t make a screen like that.” It’s amazing how you can get Steve Ballmer dismissing it while simultaneously the BlackBerry guys don’t even believe it’s possible to do that stuff.

Ben：与此同时，有个很棒的故事，说有一群 RIM（黑莓）员工围坐在一起看了那场发布会，觉得那是假视频。他们说：“这绝对做不到，我们试过了。你根本做不出那样的滚动效果，也做不出那样的屏幕。”真是太神奇了，一方面是 Steve Ballmer 在嗤之以鼻，另一方面黑莓的人根本不相信这些东西是可能实现的。

David: It's interesting to look at the spectrum of reactions here. You’ve got Steve Ballmer who just dismisses it, the BlackBerry guys are in denial. And the Google reaction, so an engineer later, an interview later with Google engineer Chris DeSalvo who was working on Android at the time and he says, “What we had suddenly looked just so ‘90s. It’s one of those things that are so obvious when you see it,” and they realized that they had to go back to the drawing board immediately, that this was game-changing.

David：这个反应的光谱真的很有意思。一边是 Steve Ballmer 直接否定，黑莓那边则处于否认阶段。而 Google 的反应呢，有位名叫 Chris DeSalvo 的 Google 工程师后来接受采访时说，那时他在 Android 团队工作，他说：“我们手头的东西突然看起来就像 90 年代的产品。当你看到那东西时，就知道这就是未来。”他们立刻意识到必须推倒重来，因为这个产品改变了一切。

Ben: Wow.

Ben：哇哦。

David: So this was January 2007 and they had these prototypes that were pretty far along with HTC.

David：那是 2007 年 1 月，当时他们和 HTC 合作的原型机已经开发到相当后期了。

Ben: Had they started the Open Handset Alliance?

Ben：他们那时已经开始推动 Open Handset Alliance（开放手机联盟）了吗？

David: That comes in a minute. But they scrap everything. They realized, “Hey, the world has changed. We now need to compete with the iPhone.” So, later that year in November, Google – and it's interesting, the timing here. We don’t know when they were originally planning to do this but they ended up doing it in November. So after the iPhone had launched, they have a big event and they announce the Android operating system and they also announce, equally importantly, the Open Handset Alliance.

David：那是在后面一点的事了。但当时他们彻底推翻了所有现有设计。他们意识到，“嘿，世界已经变了，我们现在必须要和 iPhone 竞争。”所以，在那年晚些时候的 11 月，Google 举行了一场大型发布会——时间点很微妙，我们不知道他们本来打算何时发布，但最后定在了 11 月，也就是 iPhone 已经上市之后。他们发布了 Android 操作系统，同时也宣布了一件同样重要的事：Open Handset Alliance（开放手机联盟）。

So the Open Handset Alliance, they have HTC, Sony, Samsung, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Qualcomm. The whole phone ecosystem.

这个开放手机联盟包括了 HTC、索尼、三星、Sprint、T-Mobile 和高通。整个手机生态系统的关键玩家。

Ben: It's like the stack, right?

Ben：等于说是整条技术栈，对吧？

David: The whole stack.

David：整条技术栈。

Ben: Manufacturer, they’re the operating system, they’re the carriers.

Ben：有设备制造商，有操作系统，也有运营商。

David: Yup. For all of these players in the ecosystem, if they don’t realize already this comes to be this is the only way they’re going to stand up to Apple, is they all need to work together and there needs to be this open operating system tying it all together which becomes Android. So they announce both at the same time and what’s super interesting is as part of the announcement, they also have the $10 million Android challenge. So they make it super clear, Google does, that Android is an open operating system. And that means two things: one, it's open source so anybody can use it and later on this leads to forks of Android like Cyanogen, like the Kindle Fire.

David：是的。对于生态系统中所有这些玩家来说，如果他们还没意识到，现在必须明白：对抗苹果的唯一方式就是大家合作，需要一个开放的操作系统来把一切连接起来，而这个系统就是 Android。所以他们同时宣布了 Android 和开放手机联盟。更有趣的是，在这场发布中，他们还宣布了价值 1000 万美元的 Android 编程挑战。Google 明确表示 Android 是一个开放的操作系统。这有两个含义：第一，它是开源的，任何人都可以使用。后来也确实出现了 Android 的分支，比如 Cyanogen、Kindle Fire 等。

Ben: Xiaomi as an entire company.

Ben：还有整个小米公司。

David: Xiaomi becomes super important later. But it's completely free. Anybody can take the Android software and do whatever they want with it.

David：小米后来变得非常重要。但 Android 完全是免费的。任何人都可以拿这套软件去做他们想做的事。

The other part of “open” that Google really focuses on is developers can develop for the platform, so this was before the iPhone iOS was not yet open to develop.

Google 所强调的“开放”的另一个层面是，开发者可以为这个平台开发应用。而这发生在 iPhone 的 iOS 还没有开放给开发者的时期。

Ben: That’s right. WWDC in July or in June of 2008 is when Apple walked back there, you can make web apps and announced the App Store.

Ben：没错。Apple 是在 2008 年 6 月或 7 月的 WWDC 上才转变态度，说你可以做 Web App，然后宣布了 App Store。

David: Steve Jobs initially was, you know, his posturing was “We don’t want developers. We want to control everything with the software stack.” And hard to imagine what the iPhone would be like today if there were not third party developers.

David：最初 Steve Jobs 的立场是，“我们不想要开发者。我们要控制整个软件堆栈。” 很难想象如果没有第三方开发者，今天的 iPhone 会变成什么样子。

Ben: Not successful.

Ben：肯定不会成功。

David: Well, it’s interesting. Google kind of pushes them towards this with when they make Android open and developers start to realize the massive reach with however many computers there are, PCs there are in the world and web browsers, but there’s a lot more phones. And they can reach this huge consumer base. So this really is sort of like Google’s kind of putting a flag in the ground and saying, “Hey, we’re open. That means two things. We’re open to the entire hardware and supply chain ecosystem, but much more importantly in the long term, we're open to developers.”

David：很有趣的是，Google 的开放策略其实促使了 Apple 的转变。当 Android 向开发者开放时，开发者们开始意识到，虽然全世界有很多 PC 和浏览器，但手机更多，他们能接触到的消费者也更广。因此 Google 实际上是在明确表态，“我们是开放的，这意味着两个方面：我们向整个硬件和供应链生态系统开放，但更重要的是，从长远来看，我们向开发者开放。”

So that was November 2007. But remember, they realized they couldn’t compete with the iPhone. So they end up not shipping the first Android phone until almost a year later in October 2008 and that’s when the HTC Dream slashed in the US the T-Mobile G1 is the first Android phone, the much vaunted, anticipated Google phone when it comes out.

那是 2007 年 11 月。但要记住，他们当时已经意识到自己还无法与 iPhone 竞争。所以直到将近一年后的 2008 年 10 月，他们才推出第一款 Android 手机。那就是 HTC Dream——在美国市场被称为 T-Mobile G1，这就是第一款 Android 手机，也就是当时被极力吹捧、万众期待的 Google 手机正式面世。

Ben: That still had a keyboard, right?

Ben：那款手机还有键盘，对吧？

David: Still had a keyboard. So, it was a touch screen and it had a scroll wheel on it.

David：对，还有键盘。它有触摸屏，也有一个滚轮。

Ben: That’s right.

Ben：对，我记得。

David: And physical hardware buttons which are part of Android for a long time. And then it had a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard much like the Sidekick that slid out horizontally from the device.

David：还有实体按键，这是 Android 很长时间以来的一部分设计。它还配备了一个横向滑出的全尺寸 QWERTY 键盘，跟 Sidekick 很像。

Ben: Huh.

Ben：哇哦。

David: Super interesting. So it doesn’t really look anything like the iPhone. It’s kind of its own thing. But this is the first Android phone that finally comes to market. So with T-Mobile made by HTC and it comes out sort of just in time for the holidays in 2009, doesn’t really make much of a splash. At this point the growth in iPhone shipments by today’s standards were slow but at the time it was completely taking off, clear that this was a hit.

David：非常有趣。它外观上和 iPhone 完全不同，算是另辟蹊径。但这就是第一款正式上市的 Android 手机，由 HTC 制造，通过 T-Mobile 推出，大约在 2009 年假期档发布。不过市场反响不算强烈。那时按今天的标准看，iPhone 的出货增长似乎缓慢，但在当时却是迅猛崛起，显然已经成了爆款。

Ben: I remember Steve Jobs on stage saying that I think it was their goal for the first year of the iPhone was to capture 1 percent of phones. I don’t think he said smartphones intentionally.

Ben：我记得 Steve Jobs 在台上说，他们推出 iPhone 第一年目标是拿下 1% 的手机市场份额。我觉得他有意没有说“智能手机”。

David: I believe it was intentionally.

David：我也认为那是有意为之。

Ben: Because they didn’t want to acknowledge that smartphones were a category, much like they never acknowledged Netbooks. I think it's amazing looking back like their hope was to get 1 percent. I think that’s kind of what they tracked actually that first year, but then the explosion after that – never could have predicted.

Ben：因为他们不想承认“智能手机”是一个分类，就像他们从不承认 Netbook 一样。回头看真的很惊人，当时他们的目标仅仅是拿下 1%，而实际上他们好像也真的达到了，但随后迎来的爆炸式增长——是完全无法预见的。

David: Then the market just completely exploded. So it wasn’t actually then until around the holiday season of 2009 that Google, who knows how much Google drove this but essentially the rest of the wireless phone industry ecosystem except for Apple realized they have a big problem. A big, big problem because the iPhone is on its way, you know. At this point, 3G has been launched so that was one of the big things with the original iPhone. Like, “Oh, it’s great but it’s slow.”

David：然后整个市场就彻底爆发了。实际上直到 2009 年假期季，Google——虽然不知道 Google 在其中推动了多少——但除了 Apple 之外的整个无线手机产业生态系统都意识到自己遇到了大麻烦。真的很大很大的问题，因为 iPhone 已经在迅猛发展。当时 3G 已经推出，这也是初代 iPhone 的一大痛点之一，人们说“它很好，但太慢”。

Ben: And 3G was out but it was one of those things where Apple had been working on the iPhone for so long that the only thing they can get to market by July of 2007 was an Edge phone.

Ben：3G 当时是已经有了，但 Apple 为了开发 iPhone 已经筹备了很久，到 2007 年 7 月时他们唯一能拿得出手的是一款 Edge 网络的手机。

David: Was Edge, yup. 2.5G - you remember, Ben?

David：是的，是 Edge，也就是 2.5G——你还记得吗，Ben？

Ben: That’s right.

Ben：没错。

David: And by 2009, Apple then opened up iOS to developers, so that wasn’t even an advantage anymore. So remember, iPhone was still exclusive to AT&T at this point in the US. AT&T is just raking in subscribers at this point. I believe it was already the largest phone network before the iPhone and at this point, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile have huge, huge issues.

David：到了 2009 年，Apple 已经向开发者开放 iOS，所以这也不再是优势了。别忘了，当时 iPhone 在美国还只是 AT&T 独家销售。AT&T 正在疯狂吸纳用户。我记得在 iPhone 之前它就是最大的运营商，而此时 Verizon、Sprint、T-Mobile 都面临着巨大的问题。

Ben: Yeah, that’s got to be one of the best partnership or exclusivity agreements in the history of the American corporation, is AT&T strapping itself to the iPhone as a rocket. The thing that paints it in my mind for how big a deal that was is how big a deal the opposite was. Like how widely anticipated the Verizon iPhone was. When the Verizon iPhone came out how crazy all my friends went that were non AT&T with all this incredible pent up demand for it.

Ben：对，那可能是美国企业史上最成功的合作或独家协议之一了——AT&T 就像把自己绑在了 iPhone 这枚火箭上。让我意识到这件事有多重要的，是当反过来发生时有多轰动。Verizon 版 iPhone 的发布备受期待。当它真的推出时，我那些不是 AT&T 用户的朋友全都疯狂了，之前的需求实在是压抑太久了。

David: Which is interesting. By holiday of 2009, there’s finally been enough time in the product cycle that Verizon, Google, everybody else, all the handset makers realized they got to do something and so Verizon launches the Droid in 2009.

David：这就很有意思了。到了 2009 年假期档，产品周期也终于走到一个节点，Verizon、Google 和其他所有手机厂商都意识到他们必须采取行动，于是 Verizon 在 2009 年推出了 Droid。

Ben: And they paid Lucasfilm every single time the word “droid” was mentioned.

Ben：而且他们每次提到“Droid”这个词，都要付钱给卢卡斯影业。

David: Isn’t that amazing?

David：这不是很神奇吗？

Ben: It’s at the bottom of every magazine ad. It’s so awesome that they were like, “Yeah, screw it, it's worth it.”

Ben：每一则杂志广告底部都有版权说明。他们就是觉得，“管它呢，值！”

David: It’s worth it. In a lot of ways, this was a phone ahead of its time, but the whole positioning was against the iPhone here was, the campaign was called Droid Does and this was like the old Mac and PC campaigns but in reverse it was like, “well, your iPhone doesn’t do X but Droid Does.”

David：确实值。从很多方面来说，这款手机其实是超前的。但它整个市场定位就是对抗 iPhone，他们的宣传口号是 “Droid Does”，就像早期的 Mac 和 PC 广告那样，不过是反过来，说的是“你的 iPhone 做不到的事，Droid 做得到”。

Ben: That’s right. This is like the full swing of the smartphone wars heating up where now we sort of settle into this place where Android’s got about 80 percent of the people, iPhone’s got about 20 percent of the people, but iPhone people pay for apps and much more so than Android people. It’s interesting how it’s reached this almost like not a peace treaty but it’s like we thought there was going to be one winner in this smartphone wars and it was going to be a crazy 5-year thing and one person would –

Ben：没错。这就是智能手机大战全面升温的阶段。而现在我们已经到了一个稳定局面——Android 拥有大约 80% 的用户，iPhone 拥有约 20%，但 iPhone 用户花钱买应用的意愿远远高于 Android 用户。有趣的是，这场战争最后并没有真正分出胜负，我们原以为智能手机大战会像疯狂的五年争霸战，最后一个人会称王——

David: We thought it was going to be Microsoft and Apple all over again.

David：我们原本以为会像微软对决苹果那样再来一遍。

Ben: Right, right. It’s interesting how we’ve reached this equilibrium where like the world exists in a multi-platform way kind of sustainably for at least this set of year, this decade.

Ben：对，确实如此。有意思的是我们最终达成了一种平衡：这个世界在多平台共存的状态下，至少在过去这十年里是可持续运作的。

David: This moment in time.

David：至少这个时间点是这样。

Ben: And that initial Droid Does thing, they intentionally like it was confusing to people that you could get an Android but it wasn’t from Google and it wasn’t called an Android. So I think it was like an intentional move to say “you know what, we’re just going to lean into that. The phone is going to be called a Droid. It’s the main one we’re going to market. We're not going to have Android be a consumer brand.” It was amazing how many people –

Ben：而一开始“Droid Does”这个宣传，其实也是刻意而为的。因为人们对“Android 手机”这个概念感到困惑——你可以买一部 Android 手机，但它不是 Google 出的，也不叫 Android。所以他们干脆就顺势而为，把手机直接叫做 Droid，把它当作主打产品来宣传，不把“Android”塑造成面向消费者的品牌。这种做法真是让人印象深刻——

David: And important to remember too who made the Droid – it was Motorola, which we’ll get to in a second.

David：而且还要记住，Droid 是谁制造的——是摩托罗拉，我们一会儿会讲到。

Ben: Oh, yeah. But I guess my point is like it’s amazing how it was in most people’s lexicon to ask “Do you have an iPhone or a Droid?”

Ben：对。我是说，有趣的是，在很多人的日常说法中，会直接问“你是用 iPhone 还是 Droid？”。

David: Yeah. It wasn’t Android, it was a Droid.

David：对。他们不会说 Android，而是说 Droid。

Ben: Yeah.

Ben：对。

David: So yeah, everything you’re saying, Ben, I mean this was like, these were the holy wars of mobile that got kicked off with the Droid. So basically from 2010 to kind of 2012-ish, there’s just this race where everybody who’s not Apple in the ecosystem is racing to copy Apple and then try and surpass if they can, but even just get to parity. Towards the end of time that’s when you see Samsung really emerging. I mean, they were the most shameless, just literally ripped wholesale everything from the iPhone, but it worked.

David：是的，Ben，你说得对。Droid 拉开了移动设备的“圣战”序幕。从 2010 年到 2012 年这段时间，整个生态系统里除了苹果之外的每家公司都在争相模仿苹果，试图追赶甚至超越，哪怕只是达到同一水平。到后期，三星真正崛起了。他们几乎是最无所顾忌的，简直就是照搬 iPhone 的一切——但有效。

Ben: And so fast like 2 months after Apple would announce something, like some team at Samsung will get to it, work all night and then they’d rush it to market and then they’d announce that it exists. Then maybe you could get them from the supply chain, maybe you couldn’t but they put a stake in the ground that like, “Yes, Samsung has this too.” You see it all the way through like touch ID like the had the --

Ben：而且速度特别快，比如苹果刚发布新功能两个月，三星的某个团队就会立刻加班赶工，把类似的功能做出来，然后迅速宣布他们也有了。你可能能在供应链中买到这些产品，也可能买不到，但他们就是要表明态度：“是的，三星也有这个功能。” 你可以看到这种做法贯穿始终，比如 Touch ID，他们也跟上了——

David: Slide to unlock, like there was a big fight about that.

David：还有“滑动解锁”，当时为这个功能还打过大官司。

Ben: I miss that guy.

Ben：我挺想他的。

David: Yeah. Incredible. It’s amazing like how much the world is changed though from his vision when he was alive and how different things are. The famous quote like, “if you see a stylus, we blew it.”

David：是啊，太不可思议了。惊人的是，这个世界从他还在世时的愿景变化了多少，而现在一切都大不相同。他那句著名的话是，“如果你看到一个触控笔，那就说明我们搞砸了。”

Ben: Did you hear the interview with Tim Cook a couple of weeks ago that they asked – I forget who did it, but in Apple’s recent little PR rush, they asked Tim Cook about that exact thing and they’re trying to push him on the point that like, “Are you guys blowing it?” Tim starts with “Well, first of all, it's a pencil, not a stylus.”

Ben：你有没有听几周前Tim Cook的那个采访？我忘了是谁做的了，但在苹果最近一轮公关宣传里，有人问了Tim Cook关于这件事的原话，试图逼问他：“你们是不是也搞砸了？”Tim的回答是：“首先，它是铅笔，不是触控笔。”

David: Love it.

David：太喜欢这个回答了。

Ben: I love Apple marketing.

Ben：我太喜欢苹果的市场营销了。

David: What would Steve have said? But Tim doesn’t see, which is the point.

David：乔布斯会怎么说？但Tim看不到这一点，这正是关键。

Ben: Tim did recently, you know, the last couple of years referred to the Android ecosystem as a “toxic hellstew.” Or I think he pointed out. It was like a quote ripped from a writer that they put up on the stage at Apple.

Ben：Tim最近这几年曾把Android生态系统称为“有毒的炼狱混汤”，我记得他是引用某位作家的话，苹果还把这句话打在了发布会的舞台上。

David: So you know, Google doesn’t take this lying down. They strike back. So Vic Gundotra who is a long-time exec at Google and I believe founder of or in charge of Google Plus at one point, so that was a little mark on his time there but at IO, at Google’s big conference in 2010, Vic’s asked about this and Steve’s quote and Apple’s feelings about it. And he says, this is a quote, “If Google did not act, we faced a draconian future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice. That’s a future we don't want.”

David：你知道，谷歌也不是坐以待毙。他们进行了反击。当时Vic Gundotra是谷歌的老高管，我记得他是Google Plus的创始人或负责人之一，虽然那是他履历上的一个小污点。但在2010年的Google I/O大会上，有人问他关于乔布斯那段话和苹果的态度，他说了这么一句话：“如果谷歌不采取行动，我们将面临一个严酷的未来——一个人、一家公司、一种设备、一个运营商成为我们唯一的选择。那是一个我们不想要的未来。”

Ben: Yeah, it's a very noble way to approach this business.

Ben：是啊，这是一种非常高尚的商业立场。

David: It’s like the famous Apple 1984 commercial. It’s like Apple is now the man talking on the screen and Google and Android is throwing the hammer at it.

David：这就像苹果著名的1984年广告。现在苹果成了那个站在大屏幕上讲话的人，而谷歌和Android则是那个扔锤子的人。

Ben: If you can find a way to position yourself as an underdog, even if you have a monopoly in search and one of the largest technology companies in the world, by God you should do it.

Ben：只要你能找到办法把自己塑造成一个“挑战者”的形象，即使你在搜索领域是垄断者，是世界上最大的科技公司之一，那你也该这么做，天经地义。

David: Absolutely. They’re literally Apple-ing Apple at Apple’s own game here. So it was a war and at the time everybody in the press, everybody in the tech world was “Is Android going to win? Is iOS going to win? What’s going to happen?” And startups at the time, you know, our portfolio companies and as we’re talking to new investments, it’s like “Well, what are you going to develop for?” It was a big question then because it was really hard to develop for both.

David：完全正确。他们简直是在用苹果的方式对付苹果自己。在当时，这就是一场战争。媒体、科技圈里所有人都在讨论：“Android会赢吗？iOS会赢吗？最后会怎样？”而那时的创业公司，包括我们投资组合里的公司，甚至我们在看新项目时也会问：“你们会为哪个平台开发？”这是当时一个非常大的问题，因为要同时开发两个平台非常困难。

Ben: Right. I guess it’s probably a good time to say for new listeners David is a VC here at Madrona Venture Group, we're recording out of their office this weekend. And I’m over at Pioneer Square Labs just down the street and we’re a startup studio. So it’s probably helpful to have some context on who we are and why we're doing this.

Ben：对，我想现在是个好时机介绍一下我们自己，特别是给新听众。David是Madrona Venture Group的风险投资人，我们这期节目就在他们办公室录制。我在Pioneer Square Labs工作，就在这附近，是一家创业工作室。所以你们了解一下我们的背景，也就更容易理解我们为什么会做这个节目了。

David: A couple other side notes on that one, that is more a quirk of history but it is just too fun not to talk about here – In August of 2010, HTC acquires a majority stake in Beats (Beats Audio). As a result of that from kind of 2011 to 2012-2013-ish, you can still go buy these things on Amazon which is amazing. We will link to this in the show notes. There are Beats branded Android phones out there on the market, HTC phones.

David：还有几个小插曲，算是历史的奇闻，但实在太有趣了不得不讲一下——2010年8月，HTC收购了Beats（Beats Audio）的多数股权。结果就是在大约2011到2012-2013年间，市面上出现了Beats品牌的Android手机，也就是HTC出的手机。现在你甚至还能在Amazon上买到这些产品，简直难以置信。我们会把链接放在节目说明里。

Ben: I kind of want to buy one and bring it to my next meeting at Apple pretending it’s my phone and see what happens.

Ben：我都有点想买一台，然后带去下次的苹果会议，假装那是我的手机，看看会发生什么。

David: That would be amazing. Total quirk of history. HTC was bundling Beats headphones with their Android phones for a while when they were selling them. Hard to imagine that in today’s world of Beats being part of Apple.

David：那一定很有趣。完全是一段历史趣闻。HTC当年卖手机时曾经一度会捆绑Beats耳机一起销售。想想看今天Beats已经成了苹果旗下品牌，这样的事都很难想象了。

Ben: I know.

Ben：没错。

David: Also makes me realize just how small the technology world is. I feel like we talk about this a lot on this show but whether it’s Marc Lore had worked at Amazon and Amazon had acquired his last company and then he’s vowing to destroy them or all the companies that came out of PayPal, or Photoshop and Pixar (they came out of Lucasfilm), It’s a small world in this corner of the economy here.

David：这也让我意识到科技圈真的很小。我觉得我们节目经常在讲这个话题，不管是Marc Lore曾在亚马逊工作，亚马逊收购了他上家公司，然后他又誓言要击败亚马逊，还是PayPal帮派出来的那些公司，或者Photoshop和Pixar（它们都起源于卢卡斯影业），在科技经济的这个角落，真的是个小世界。

Ben: It is. I guess they’re sort of tech themes, like themes of the show. It’s funny how long things seem in our mind and how short they were in number of years. When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, Android had not been announced yet. They were not at war. They were so friendly that Eric Schmidt was on Apple’s board.

Ben：确实如此。我想这些算是科技圈的主题吧，也是我们节目的主题。人们脑海中很多事情感觉历时很久，但实际上只发生在短短几年之间。比如2007年苹果推出iPhone时，Android还没发布，双方根本不是敌人，关系非常友好，连谷歌的Eric Schmidt当时都是苹果董事会成员。

David: Eric Schmidt, yeah, came on stage at the launch of the iPhone and talked about how Google was going to be an integral part of the iPhone.

David：是啊，Eric Schmidt还在iPhone发布会上上台讲话，说谷歌将成为iPhone不可或缺的一部分。

Ben: And it was. I mean Google Maps was huge, like that was a 10-pole feature of –

Ben：确实如此。比如Google Maps就非常关键，简直是当时iPhone上的一根支柱功能——

David: Not to mention Google Search which we will get into in a minute.

David：更别提Google搜索了，我们一会儿还会聊到。

Ben: Indeed. But it’s incredible how fast these companies became at each other’s throats and completely separated. I mean, the way that companies are direct competitors like if you go back 20 years, Apple and Microsoft are direct competitors and hate each other, and Google is like this benevolent, hands-off “we serve all” group. And in very short order from 2007 to 2009, it became Apple and Google at each other’s throats and fast forward to today, where like Microsoft Services are all over these platforms and Apple’s partnering with Microsoft and a lot of things. Another crazy example is like Apple launching this big enterprise partnership with IBM like how fast the world changes.

Ben：没错。但最不可思议的是这些公司之间的关系转变得有多快，几乎是瞬间就开始互相对立、完全割裂。你要是回到20年前，那时苹果和微软是直接竞争对手、互相憎恨，而谷歌还是那个看起来仁慈、置身事外、“我们为所有人服务”的公司。但从2007到2009的短短几年间，苹果和谷歌就开始反目成仇。快进到今天，微软的服务遍布各个平台，苹果也和微软在很多方面展开合作。另一个疯狂的例子是苹果与IBM建立大型企业合作关系——这个世界变化得有多快啊。

David: And you’re in the middle of this. I mean you were one of the original folks on Office for iPad.

David：而你正好身处其中。你可是最早参与iPad版Office开发的人之一啊。

Ben: Was. That was heck of a project.

Ben：是的，那项目真是够呛。

David: So we’ll get more into this a minute, but I think it was – I mean, this is a little flash forward to tech themes for me – but I think the reason this was happening was like all these big tech companies realized all of a sudden that this was the opening of a new frontier and a new market, the mobile market that was going to be literally the biggest market that technology and maybe the world had ever seen. I mean because Apple becomes the world’s most valuable company during this time period. So all these companies are realizing that you’re going to have first couple of hundred million people in the United States and then a billion people around the world and then multiple billions of people and ultimately every person in the world when we get to the end stage, you know, still a couple years hence from now, is going to be coming online, buying a smartphone, having access to technology for the first time and as friendly as Apple and Google were before this, all of a sudden it's a race to go capture this market.

David：我们等会儿还会更深入聊这个，但我现在可以稍微剧透一下关于科技趋势的思考——我认为这一切之所以会发生，是因为这些大型科技公司突然意识到，一个全新的疆域、一个全新的市场正要开启：移动市场，这将成为科技史上、也可能是人类历史上最大的市场。你看，在这段时间里，苹果成为了全球市值最高的公司。所有这些公司都意识到，先是美国的几亿人，然后是全球十亿人，接着是数十亿人，最终是地球上的每一个人——我们现在距离这个终点还有几年——都会联网，都会买智能手机，第一次接触到科技产品。所以，即便苹果和谷歌一开始关系多么友好，但就在一夜之间，他们变成了争夺这块市场的竞争对手。

But I think the mistake that they made is a release that – I don’t know if there was a mistake but the fight that they were fighting at first wasn’t the right fight. They were fighting for the hardware there.

但我觉得他们当时犯的错是——其实我也不确定算不算错误，但他们最初打的那场仗并不是正确的仗。他们在争夺的是硬件市场。

Ben: Right. And the question is, was Google doing that first? Why did Google? So is this sort of as we transition from the history and facts into more of like our analysis portion. Where we are today, it’s very clear that the reason that Android needs to exist is to prevent Apple from being the front door for users to use Google Services. Like Google can’t afford to give up that control, number one, in case people are going to use other services instead of Google Services, namely Google Search where all their money comes from, where all the revenue comes from.

Ben：对，问题是，谷歌当时是率先行动的吗？谷歌为什么这么做？所以接下来我们就从历史事实过渡到分析部分了。就今天的现实来说，Android存在的理由非常明确：防止苹果成为用户接触谷歌服务的“前门”。谷歌无法承受失去这个控制权的代价，首先是因为一旦放弃，人们可能会去使用其他服务而不是谷歌服务，尤其是Google搜索——那是他们所有收入的来源。

Secondarily, there is an agreement that gets signed with people who are sending traffic to Google and I may as well just come out and start with this number right now – 34 percent of Google Search revenue from their AdSense, right? AdWords.

其次，那些把流量导向谷歌的公司会与谷歌签署协议。我现在就直接抛出这个数字吧——谷歌搜索广告收入的34%要分给这些合作方，对吧？来自AdSense，或者更准确地说是AdWords的收入。

David: Well, so what Ben is referring to, for our new listeners, one of the things that we love on this show is lawsuits – not targeted at us but between the companies that we cover because all sorts of really interesting things come out in lawsuits. Over the last few year, Oracle has been waging a lawsuit against Google for Google’s and Android’s use of Java APIs in creating Android. One of the things that came out in that lawsuit is how much money Google pays Apple for having Google Search as the default search on the iPhone. And it’s pretty incredible.

David：Ben刚才提到的这件事，对于我们的新听众来说值得解释一下：我们节目里特别爱讲诉讼——不是针对我们，而是科技公司之间的诉讼，因为诉讼过程会揭示很多有趣的内幕。过去几年里，甲骨文起诉谷歌，指控谷歌在Android系统中使用了Java的API。而这个案子的一大爆料是，谷歌为了让Google搜索成为iPhone的默认搜索引擎，每年付给苹果多少钱。这数字非常惊人。

Ben: Yeah, the amazing thing, David and I were looking over the lawsuit and thinking about this, it’s not a flat fee. Apple gets 34 percent of all of the search revenue that comes from their platform.

Ben：对，最让人震惊的是，我和David在研究这个诉讼的时候发现，这可不是一笔固定费用。苹果从通过其平台产生的所有谷歌搜索收入中，抽取了34%的分成。

David: Somewhere in the neighborhood of 34 percent. It was at one time around that. A lot of this part of the lawsuit, Google freaked out about and had sealed, but for a moment it was public how this worked.

David：大概是34%左右，某个时间点是这个比例。这部分内容后来被谷歌紧急要求法院封存了，但曾有一段时间是公开的，人们才知道这个合作到底怎么运作。

Ben: So in 2015, estimates from Goldman Sachs are that Google did about $15 billion of revenue from their mobile search. So Apple has about 18 percent of the global market share. So if you kind of figure out what that comes to, it’s about 918 million by that calculation or as released in these documents, about a billion dollars that Google paid to Apple for Apple to be using or directing people to Google Search. So then you start thinking about okay, the strategy for Android as it is today is very clearly to basically get free customers, basically people that are already Google’s customers to directly interface with Google and search. In that way, Google doesn’t have to pay that revenue split to anybody else for access to those users.

Ben：所以2015年，高盛的估算是，谷歌来自移动搜索的收入约为150亿美元。而苹果大约占据全球移动市场的18%份额。按这个比例计算，大约是9.18亿美元，或者根据文件披露的具体数字，大概是10亿美元左右，这是谷歌为了让苹果使用或引导用户使用Google搜索所支付的金额。所以你想想，今天Android的策略非常清晰——就是为了获取“免费的用户”，也就是本来就是谷歌用户的人群，直接让他们与谷歌进行互动和搜索。这样谷歌就不用为了这些用户而向别人支付分成了。

David: That’s just something that I didn’t really realize until we started doing the research for this episode, but it is kind of mind-blowing if you think about it, like hey, Apple is getting a percentage of Google AdWords revenue that happens on the iPhone. Like that’s crazy, one. But two, it all makes sense for Google now. To the extent that people use Android phones or use the Chrome browser on the iPhone instead of Safari, or any one of a number of ways that people are searching on platforms that are owned by Google or at least controlled by Google versus other platforms where they have to pay out revenue shares like it’s a no-brainer.

David：这是我们为这期节目做研究时我才意识到的事，但仔细一想真的很震撼——苹果居然能从iPhone上发生的Google广告收入中拿到分成。第一，这太疯狂了。第二，这一切从谷歌的角度看又很合理。只要用户使用Android手机，或者在iPhone上使用Chrome浏览器而不是Safari，又或者通过其他任何谷歌控制的渠道进行搜索，那么谷歌就不需要向别人支付分成，这当然是稳赚不赔的事。

Ben: Yeah, the case for like basically Google is a company that makes money when people search and then click on ads.

Ben：对，说到底，谷歌是一家靠人们搜索并点击广告赚钱的公司。

David: And the people search on properties that are not Google, even indirectly like they’re searching on Google but they’re doing it in the Safari browser, Google has to pay a tax every time that happens.

David：但如果人们是在非谷歌的平台上搜索，即便是间接的——比如用Safari搜索Google内容——谷歌每次都得交一笔“税”。

Ben: Yeah, and so Google basically is the entire reason that Android exists so that Google doesn’t need to pay for access to their own existing customers. What mobile did is it inserted this new wedge into Google already had this relationship where everybody opened up their computer and Google was their homepage and they would search or it was built into browsers through all these agreements they had cut. Mobile opens this opportunity for all of a sudden there’s this whole new platform with all these people that had switched over to it and all these people.

Ben：没错，而这也正是Android存在的根本原因——谷歌不想为接触自己原本就拥有的客户而付费。原本在桌面时代，每个人打开电脑，Google就是他们的首页，或者通过浏览器的协议默认集成了搜索。但移动时代改变了一切，它引入了一个全新的平台，涌入了大量用户。

David: Coming online for the first time.

David：这些人很多是第一次上网。

Ben: For the first time, yeah. Not only does Google have to make sure that those places don’t use their customers, small as they may be, but they actually have to pay a cut of their revenue for the privilege of being the default search there. So when you kind of take a step back, the strategy for Android, the reason that Chrome exists, these things are all the same and it’s to make sure that no one else is inserted between the revenue generated by clicking on ads from search and their customers.

Ben：对，是第一次上网。谷歌不仅要确保这些平台不会“挖走”它的客户（无论这个群体多小），而且还得为成为这些平台的默认搜索引擎而支付分成。所以你退一步看，Android存在的战略意义，Chrome存在的意义，完全一致：就是要确保广告点击带来的收入和用户之间没有中间人插手。

David: It's interesting like Wall Street and plenty of other analysts that are looking at Google, they always throw stones Google and they say like, “Oh, come on. This company can’t succeed at anything except AdWords, like none of their products make any money. Android doesn’t make any money. YouTube doesn’t make any money,” as we talked about, which I still feel good about our grade on YouTube. But Chrome doesn’t make any money.

David：很有意思的是，华尔街和很多分析师经常抨击谷歌，说“拜托，这家公司除了AdWords啥都不赚钱，它的产品都不盈利。Android不赚钱，YouTube不赚钱”——我们节目里也聊过，我觉得我们给YouTube的评价还是挺中肯的——Chrome也不赚钱。

Ben: But yet to see, for the record.

Ben：确实如此，先记下来。

David: But the reality is things like Android, things like Chrome are huge economic value to Google.

David：但现实是，Android和Chrome这样的产品对谷歌来说具有巨大的经济价值。

Ben: Yeah. I mean it’s providing defensibility to Google’s business. To carry out that calculation a little bit, so then if you’re the flipside of that, since Google has 80 percent market share, so you look at the 80 percent of people that are searching on phones and generating that $15 billions of Google Search revenue a year right now, if you take that 34 percent that they don’t have to pay out to other people, Android is effectively saving them $4 billion a year just on that because Google doesn’t have to pay for that traffic.

Ben：是啊，这些产品增强了谷歌业务的护城河。我们算一笔账吧：谷歌现在在全球搜索市场上有80%的份额，假设这80%的移动用户每年为谷歌带来150亿美元的搜索广告收入。如果这些流量来自非谷歌平台，谷歌得支付34%的分成；但Android上的流量谷歌可以完全保留，所以光这一块，Android每年就能为谷歌节省约40亿美元的分成支出。

David: Which is pretty incredible.

David：这太不可思议了。

Ben: Yeah.

Ben：确实。

David: All right. Two things real quick to wrap up history and facts and then we’ll move on to acquisition category. One, I mentioned Motorola earlier. So, Google makes this move that is in some ways completely brilliant and in other ways completely boneheaded where they buy Motorola in August of 2011 for $12.5 billion and they say at the time that the primary driver of this was Motorola’s patent portfolio. And this is the brilliant part of it. Apple, Oracle as we’ve already talked about, Microsoft, many others, the phone companies, there starts to be a lot of litigation happening in this space and people are enforcing patents and defending patents, and Google being a much younger company than these other firms didn’t have the kind of patent bench strength that they did. So Google buys Motorola, very old company, gets all of their patent portfolio and then helps defend Google and things like the Oracle case.

David：好，我们快速说完两点历史和事实，就进入收购这个板块。第一，我之前提到摩托罗拉。谷歌在2011年8月做了一个可以说既极其聪明又有些愚蠢的举动：他们以125亿美元收购了摩托罗拉。他们当时说收购的主要动因是摩托罗拉的专利组合——这是这笔交易聪明的地方。因为正如我们前面提到的，苹果、甲骨文、微软，还有很多手机厂商，当时纷纷开始在手机领域展开专利诉讼，大家都在主张专利、防御专利。而谷歌作为一家比这些公司年轻得多的企业，在专利储备方面远不如他们。于是谷歌收购了摩托罗拉这家老牌公司，拿下了它的专利库，从而可以在比如Oracle案这类事情上为自己提供法律防御。

But the second part of the deal was, “Oh, well now we're going to have a unified stack within Google from operating system up through the hardware. We’re going to make these incredible phones. Didn’t happen.

但这笔交易的第二个部分是：“哦，现在我们要在谷歌内部从操作系统到硬件打通整个产品栈，我们要造出令人惊叹的手机。”——结果并没有实现。

Ben: It didn’t go so well.

Ben：这事不太顺利。

David: Didn’t happen. So they end up selling the assets of Motorola to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, a lot less than $12.5 billion. But to the extent they save themselves from multiple billion dollar judgments against them, may have been successful.

David：确实没有实现。最终他们把摩托罗拉的资产以29亿美元的价格卖给了联想，远低于当初的125亿美元。但如果从他们因此免于多起数十亿美元赔偿的角度来看，也许算是一笔成功的防御性收购。

The other interesting that’s going to become very relevant as we do the analysis here, in 2010, a company in China is founded called Xiaomi which I presume a lot of our listeners are familiar with. But for those who aren’t, people refer to this as the “Apple of China.”

另一个很有趣也将与我们接下来的分析密切相关的事件是：2010年，中国成立了一家公司叫小米，我猜很多听众应该都熟悉。但对不熟悉的朋友来说，小米经常被称为“中国的苹果”。

Ben: And if you've seen that written, that’s X-I-A-O-M-I.

Ben：如果你见过这个名字的拼写，它是 X-I-A-O-M-I。

David: Yep. So at this point, sitting here in September 2016, Uber I believe is the most highly valued private technology company in the world. Xiaomi, I believe, is the second valued at somewhere I believe between $40 to $50 billion in their last financing. And Xiaomi is interesting. Much like Samsung and others have been accused of just copying the iPhone but what Xiaomi has done, Samsung was completely reliant on Google. They just made the hardware and then they had some software “skins” that they would put on top of Android. But it’s running Google Android. Xiaomi, as we talked about, completely forked Android, have their own branch of Android that they fully control. There’s a startup called Cyanogen that has also done the same thing that only distributes the operating system.

David：是的。此刻，我们在2016年9月，Uber是全球估值最高的私人科技公司，而小米应该是第二，最近一轮融资的估值大概在400到500亿美元之间。小米很有意思。就像三星等公司常被指控只是抄袭iPhone一样，但小米的做法不同。三星完全依赖谷歌——他们只负责制造硬件，然后在Android系统上加点“皮肤”，但底层还是谷歌Android。而小米则不同，我们之前说过，它是彻底fork了Android，自主开发了一个完全受自己控制的分支系统。还有一家初创公司Cyanogen也做了类似的事情，只负责发布操作系统。

Ben: Kindle Fire does the same.

Ben：Kindle Fire也是这么做的。

David: Amazon does this with Kindle Fire. And Xiaomi basically leveraged open-source Android to compete with Apple. So they make beautiful, relatively low cost devices, sell them in China. They’re widely popular and they run a version of Android that Xiaomi has completely locked down and controls.

David：亚马逊就是这样做的，Kindle Fire用的就是自家改版的Android。而小米的战略就是利用开源Android来对抗苹果。他们制造漂亮又相对便宜的设备，在中国销售，非常受欢迎，而且运行的是小米自己完全封闭、自己控制的Android系统版本。

Ben: And this is a good time to draw the line between what is the Android Open Source project and what is Android as licensed from Google. So, you can get Android absolutely for free from Google and it comes with all the services that Google does – so Google Maps, Gmail and most importantly, access to the Play Store and all the apps in there. Or you can go get the source code yourself and you can fork it and you can just use Android source code. But the major disadvantage there is you don’t have access on your platform to the Play Store and you don’t have access to all these services. So you really have to not only go and build that yourself, all those mail app –

Ben：这时候我们可以很好地区分一下“Android开源项目”（AOSP）和“谷歌授权版Android”之间的区别。你可以从谷歌那里完全免费获得Android系统，而且它会附带谷歌的一整套服务——像是Google Maps、Gmail，最重要的是可以接入Play Store以及里面所有的应用。另一种方式是自己去获取Android的源代码，fork出一个版本，自行使用。但那样最大的缺点就是你无法接入Play Store，也无法使用谷歌提供的那些服务。所以你不仅要自己开发，比如邮件应用……

David: Or plug in other partners.

David：或者找第三方合作伙伴来替代。

Ben: Right. But you actually have to build an entire new developer ecosystem. Like Amazon has to go around and convince everyone to submit to the Amazon app store and the Google Play Store. And that requires a little bit of work from each developer. Generally worth it but you kind of have this new cold start problem. So what Google sort of has an advantage here is for people who care about, for manufacturers that care about having access to all the apps in the Play Store and all the services, they’re just going to roll with stock Android and then Google gets to make sure that you don’t change any of the searcher services away from them.

Ben：对，但你实际上得从零建立一个完整的开发者生态系统。就像亚马逊那样，他们得一家一家地说服开发者把App提交到Amazon App Store，而不是Google Play Store。这对开发者来说还需要多做一些适配工作。虽然一般来说还是值得的，但这就是一个“冷启动”问题。而谷歌的优势就在于——那些在意接入Play Store和谷歌服务的厂商，会选择使用谷歌官方Android系统，这样谷歌就能确保用户不会被引导去用别的搜索服务。

David: Yup. All right. Sorry that was a long one. There is so much to cover here with Android.

David：没错。好吧，这一段确实讲得有点长，但关于Android的内容实在太多了。

Ben: David, so we’ve kind of talked about like what the point of Android is right now, do you think that was the strategy when they acquired it and when they started getting into the mobile game? Like why was mobile going to be important to Google in 2005?

Ben：David，我们刚刚聊了Android现在的战略意义，但你觉得谷歌当初收购它、进入移动领域的时候，最初的战略也是这个吗？2005年，对谷歌来说，移动为什么重要？

David: I don’t know but I don’t think there was any way anyone could have foretold what was going to happen in this market. I think this was a great buy by Google of a really talented team working on some really cool technology that had a lot of potential, but Google probably knew about the iPhone because Eric Schmidt was on Steve Jobs’ board at Apple. But I don’t think anybody really could have figured out exactly how this was going to play out. But Google has done an amazing job with Android in terms of shepherding it through this widely complex gyrations in the market that, by the way, completely killed BlackBerry. It’s a company that was many multibillion dollar company that was the leader in smartphones just decimated, gone.

David：我不确定，但我觉得没有任何人能预见移动市场会发展成现在这个样子。我觉得谷歌当初的收购是一笔很棒的交易——买下了一个才华横溢的团队，他们在做一些非常酷、有潜力的技术。谷歌可能确实知道iPhone的存在，因为Eric Schmidt当时在乔布斯的董事会里。但我不认为有人真能预判这个市场会怎么演变。不过谷歌确实在Android的管理和推进上做得非常出色，把它带过了一个极度复杂、动荡的市场环境——而这个过程也彻底摧毁了BlackBerry。那曾是一家市值数十亿美元、智能手机领域的领头公司，如今已经没落殆尽。

Ben: Yeah.

Ben：对。

David: And Microsoft in a lot of ways too, you know, obviously Microsoft is having a resurgence now and wasn’t destroyed, but they were I think one of the leading mobile operating system providers and now that’s gone. Google really has done a great job shepherding this.

David：微软其实在很多方面也类似。现在微软当然正在复兴，并没有被摧毁，但他们当年是领先的移动操作系统提供商之一，如今那一块也彻底没了。而谷歌在Android的发展上真的做得非常出色。

Ben: Yeah, it’s a great point. All right, do you want to move on to acquisition category?

Ben：是啊，说得很好。那我们接下来聊聊“收购类型”这个板块？

David: Absolutely.

David：当然。

Ben: Awesome. I’m going to go with technology here. Other choices are people, product, business line, asset, or other. My initial inclination was product but this was so early that what they were acquiring was not a complete product and not something that they can go to market with and something that didn’t have its own independent, fully fleshed out strategy. What they are really buying was kind of this core technology that actually no one else really went out and tried to build that. Like it clearly is a difficult piece of technology to build because…

Ben：好，那我这边会把它归类为“技术类”收购。其他选项还包括“人才”、“产品”、“业务线”、“资产”或“其他”。我一开始也考虑过归为“产品”，但这个项目当时太早期了，它并不是一个完整的产品，没法直接推向市场，也没有一个独立成熟的商业战略。他们真正买到的是一项核心技术——而这项技术其实其他人并没有真的去尝试构建。显然这是一项很难开发的技术，因为……

David: Surprising though too because clearly it's difficult, but it itself was based on Linux. Somebody else could have also taken Linux and the Android team was a super small team and hadn’t raised any VC when Google bought it.

David：但这也挺令人惊讶的，因为显然这技术很难，但Android本身是基于Linux的。别人其实也完全可以拿Linux来做类似的事。而且当时Android团队非常小，在被谷歌收购之前甚至都没融过资。

Ben: And now there’s no incentive to go out and building anything else because if you were going to build anything else, you’d have the cold start problem on all those services.

Ben：而现在也没人有动力再去开发别的系统了，因为一旦你这么做，你就要面对所有那些服务生态的“冷启动”问题。

David: Well, everybody’s already on iOS and Android.

David：是啊，现在大家都已经在用iOS和Android了。

Ben: Right. But it is interesting how Google has this core technology and access to services that it licenses out and I guess it’s a free license, but at the very core of that is this technology that they acquired.

Ben：没错。但有趣的是，谷歌拥有这项核心技术，并把配套的服务授权给其他厂商使用（虽然是免费的），而所有这些的根基，其实就是他们当初收购而来的这项技术。

David: I basically gave my answer to this earlier, which I won’t repeat all of it but I completely agree this was a technology acquisition when they bought it. Then Google has done just this incredible job of shepherding it through. I actually wrote down that it was a technology acquisition with a little bit of some great talent when they bought it. But over time, this has gone from a technology to a product to business line and now an asset at Google. It’s really been under the storage of the whole company.

David：我其实前面已经说过我的看法，就不重复了，但我完全同意，这最初是一笔“技术类收购”。谷歌后来在推动它发展方面真的做得太好了。我还记了个笔记，当时他们收购的既是一项技术，也附带了一些很出色的人才。但随着时间推移，这笔交易从单纯的技术，演变成了产品、业务线，最终成为谷歌的一项战略资产。它已经成为整个公司的重要组成部分了。

Ben: And it’s amazing how it’s an asset of defensibility. I mean, really the core thing they get from Android, in my opinion is making sure they don’t lose access to all those people searching. For as many of these interesting moon shots as Google is working on and self-driving cars truly could be a very different business for them and a very big and profitable one that actually rivals Search. Like Google makes money from having a marketplace of ads when you search and sometimes on other websites. I think that when you boil it down, they bought defensibility and more importantly, it was a cheap buy. What they did was invest 10 years into building an entire arm of their business to provide defensibility.

Ben：而且最厉害的是，这还是一项“防御型资产”。在我看来，谷歌从Android那里获得的核心价值，是确保他们不会失去对搜索用户的接触。虽然谷歌在做很多激进的“登月项目”，比如自动驾驶，也许未来这些真的能成为一种全新的、大规模盈利的业务，甚至能与搜索业务并驾齐驱。但归根到底，谷歌赚钱靠的是广告市场——当人们在搜索时看到广告，或者在其他网站上。所以最终来看，他们其实是花钱买了一个“防御权”，而且收购成本很低。他们花了10年时间建立起了这条业务线来增强自身的护城河。

David: Totally agree. Should we move on to what would have happened otherwise?

David：我完全同意。那我们接下来讨论下“如果没有收购，会发生什么”？

Ben: Yeah. So I was thinking about this one earlier and my core question is I guess could and would Google have built themselves into the position that they’re in today, if they had not made the Android acquisition.

Ben：好。我之前在想这个问题，核心就是：如果当初谷歌没有收购Android，他们是否能凭自己的力量做到今天这个地位？

David: Interesting. We usually think about what would have happened otherwise from the startup’s perspective.

David：很有意思。我们通常讨论“如果没有收购”都是从创业公司的视角出发。

Ben: Where is that company going to land?

Ben：比如那家公司最终会变成什么样？

David: Which here I think is an easy question to answer because there’s no way. The playing field was so massive here as this market evolved. There’s no way a small independent company could have at the scale of impact. So I don’t think Android – it probably would have been bought by somebody else or failed on its own. But yeah, for Google, could they have done this without buying Android?

David：而这个案例其实很容易回答，因为市场格局如此之大，小公司根本没法达到那个影响力的规模。所以我不认为Android会自己走到今天——它要么被别的公司收购，要么自己失败。关键问题是：对于谷歌来说，如果没买Android，他们还可能做到现在的地位吗？

Ben: Let’s say hypothetically they had the foresight to know that the world would be the way it is today.

Ben：假设他们当时就有先见之明，知道未来的世界会发展成今天这样——

David: Which again, they knew what Apple was up to.

David：而且别忘了，他们确实知道苹果当时在做什么。

Ben: Yeah, and they knew they would need a competitive mobile operating system or maybe even actual phones to make sure that they owned that customer relationship to funnel people to search. Then you have a build or buy decision. And 50 million is like, you know, let’s say they were going to staff a team to go and build basically Android in-house. It feels like it’s close. It feels like this was not an outlandish…

Ben：是的，而且他们当时已经知道自己需要一个有竞争力的移动操作系统，甚至可能还需要亲自做手机，来确保他们能够掌握用户关系、引导用户使用谷歌搜索。于是问题就变成了“自建还是收购”。而当初的收购价是5000万美元……我们假设他们自己组建一个团队，在内部重建一个Android，其实花费可能也差不多。听起来这笔收购并不离谱，甚至性价比挺高的……

David: Especially back then, I mean Google was the darling of Silicon Valley. Everybody wanted to work there, they had just gone public. Certainly they could have done it. The question I think is: would they have? They bought Android, at least part of it was Larry and Sergey were Sidekick fans, right? They knew Andy and Google’s M&A strategy has always been about acquiring really talented teams and having those people come in to Google and see what they do. In this case, they hit it out of the park. Would anyone at Google have been enough of a champion and visionary about what was going to happen to do this otherwise.

David：特别是那时候，谷歌是硅谷的宠儿，人人都想去那工作，他们刚刚上市，当然有能力自己去做。但关键问题是：他们会去做吗？他们收购Android，其中一部分原因是Larry和Sergey都是Sidekick的粉丝，对吧？他们认识Andy Rubin，而谷歌一贯的并购策略就是收购有才华的团队，把这些人引进谷歌，看看他们能创造什么。而这次的结果堪称完美。但如果没有Andy Rubin这个人，谷歌内部是否有人能足够坚定和有远见地推动这样一件事？

Ben: Right. Did you need an Andy Rubin to kind of be at the helm of that.

Ben：对，也就是说，这件事是否必须得有Andy Rubin那样的人来主导才可能实现？

David: Like we said in the beginning, Andy was born to start this company. His whole career to this point, as Steve Jobs says, you can only connect the dots looking backwards, not forwards. But looking backwards, it’s hard to imagine anyone more qualified or who had been thinking about this problem about how do you create a really compelling mobile computer and operating system and experience than Andy.

David：就像我们一开始说的，Andy简直就是为创办这家公司而生的。回顾他到那时为止的整个职业生涯，正如乔布斯说过的：“你只能向后看时连接这些点，而不是向前。”而当你往回看，就很难想象还有谁比Andy更适合、更早开始思考“如何打造一款真正吸引人的移动计算设备、操作系统和用户体验”这个问题。

Ben: Yeah, you’re right. The thing that keeps tugging at me is you could see a very classic Microsoft way to go about this where Google says, “Okay, we got to have phones, we’re not going to make the phones. We’re going to make the operating system, we’re going to charge for the operating system.” But Android already had this whole open source thing going on and they said, “You know, we’re going to be completely open source.” They hadn’t figure out the license packet with Google services.

Ben：对，你说得没错。我心里一直在想的是，谷歌本来完全可以走一条非常“微软式”的路径：我们需要进军手机市场，但我们不做手机，我们只做操作系统，然后对厂商收授权费。但Android当时已经建立起了开源框架，他们的思路是“我们要完全开源”。当然，他们当时还没有想清楚谷歌服务的授权打包方式。

David: Yeah, built on Linux.

David：对，而且它是构建在Linux上的。

Ben: But was that a forcing function to make Google go into this business strategy of “give it away for free” or would Google have arrived at this “give it away for free” business strategy on their own if they hadn’t acquired Android. One thing that just popped in my head is you could make the case that well, compared to the insane business that Search is, they shouldn’t be in the business of selling individual software licenses. But they’re doing it with Google Apps. It's this tiny portion of their revenue but they haven’t totally shied away from the traditional business model.

Ben：但问题是，这种“完全开源”的基因是不是倒逼谷歌走上“免费分发”的商业模式？还是说，就算谷歌没有收购Android，他们最终也会走上这条“免费”道路？我刚才脑子里突然冒出一个想法：你也可以说，相比谷歌搜索这种夸张的生意模式，他们没必要去搞按份卖软件授权的事情。但你看他们在Google Apps上就是这么做的——虽然那部分只占他们营收的一小块，但也说明他们并没有完全排斥传统的软件商业模式。

David: It’s interesting. I mean if you think about the grade that we gave Google Docs which is a big part of Google Apps, I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it was not an A. We haven’t graded Android yet, more to discuss. But I’m pretty confident I’m going to be higher than it was on Google Docs.

David：确实有意思。如果你回想我们当初给Google Docs（Google Apps的核心部分之一）打的分，我记不太清了，但肯定不是A。我们还没给Android评分，还有很多可以探讨的，但我可以肯定，我对Android的评分肯定会比Docs高得多。

Ben: Yeah. I guess the question in my mind that I don’t think we can really answer is yeah, would Google have done this very unique open source approach to grow insanely quickly and get on 80 percent of the world’s smartphones without acquiring Android.

Ben：是的。我脑子里的那个问题其实我们可能永远也无法真正回答：如果没有收购Android，谷歌是否还会采取这种极其独特的“开源”战略，实现如此惊人的增长、渗透进全球80%的智能手机？

David: Well, listeners, if any of you were at Google at this time, let us know. We’d love to know. Okay, tech themes?

David：好吧，听众朋友们，如果你们当时就在谷歌工作，欢迎告诉我们，我们真想知道。好，下一部分，科技主题？

Ben: We can’t go an episode without bringing up Ben Thompson and Stratechery but you have to own the front door to the customer in this day and age.

Ben：我们每期节目似乎都得提一下Ben Thompson和他的Stratechery，但在当今时代，你必须掌握“通往客户的前门”。

David: The reason – Ben and I were talking about this before the show too – I think the reason why that’s important in the current internet information economy that we live in is what the internet has done is it has made distribution free. In the old world, this is – not taking credit for this, this is Ben Thompson’s insight here – in the old industrial world, distribution was really hard. So you had to aggregate distribution and if you control distribution, the customer was your serf basically in your kingdom. But now, distribution is free and anybody can build anything. Like we were saying, anybody could have build something on top of Linux, a mobile operating system. So in that world, you need to win the customer and you need to have the best customer experience.

David：原因是——我和Ben在录节目前也讨论过这个——我认为这在当今的信息互联网经济中如此重要，是因为互联网的出现让“分发”变成了免费的。在旧时代——这不是我自己的观点，是Ben Thompson的洞察——在工业时代，分发非常困难。所以你必须集中渠道，如果你掌握了分发权，你的客户就成了你领地里的“农奴”。但现在，分发是免费的，任何人都可以开发任何东西。就像我们刚才说的，任何人都可以在Linux上构建一个移动操作系统。所以在这样的世界里，你必须赢得客户，必须提供最好的客户体验。

Ben: Yup.

Ben：对。

David: That is one of mine too. I think the spin that I had on that was if you think about what Microsoft was trying to do at that point in time with Windows Mobile, the Microsoft way of thinking which is evolving now but certainly still at that point in time was like “we control everything you need to distribute a computing experience to a customer. We have a deep relationship with Intel. We have all the software developers that can make our own proprietary operating system. We don’t use open source. And we have relationships with all the carriers, the phone carriers and we can push this stuff out in to market,” and that’s great and people will use it, especially corporate customers because they need it. But Windows Mobile especially in that day and age sucked. I believe I had one of those devices at one point in time and it was very frustrating. They didn’t approach it from this way that, Ben, you’re talking about, that we’re talking about now like okay, we can just take Linux and build this and let’s build something awesome on top of it. So, that’s one.

David：我也有类似的观点。我想说的是，如果你回头看看微软当时在Windows Mobile上所做的事情，他们的思维方式——虽然现在已经在改变，但在当时还是很典型的微软式思维——就是“我们掌握了一切，能把计算体验推向用户市场”。他们和Intel有深度合作，他们拥有大量软件开发者，可以开发自己的专有操作系统，他们不会使用开源代码。他们还跟所有的运营商有合作关系，所以可以把这些产品推广出去。听起来没问题，尤其是企业客户肯定会用，因为他们“需要”它。但当时的Windows Mobile真的很烂。我记得我曾用过一台那种设备，非常令人沮丧。他们完全没采用我们现在所讨论的这种思路，也就是“我们能不能基于Linux做点很棒的东西”。这是一点。

The other one that I wanted to talk about that I referenced earlier was thinking about how the mobile market has played out, it’s interesting to see like you kind of see this in technology that the area of competition and what’s interesting kind of moves up the stack. So in the old PC world, it was the hardware. You can buy a Mac or you can buy a PC. Then in the beginning of the phone world, as we talked about, it wasn’t really so much about the hardware whether you’re going to buy because Android wasn’t competing in hardware. But it was the services, you know, are you going to buy an Android phone that has Google Services baked into it or are you going to buy an Apple phone that has Apple services and that Google can still participate in that but they’re paying the Apple tax.

我之前提到的另一点是关于移动市场的发展轨迹。在科技领域很有意思的一点是，竞争的焦点不断“上移”到更高的层级。在旧的PC时代，竞争焦点是硬件——你是买Mac还是买PC。而在移动手机的早期阶段，就像我们讨论的那样，竞争并不完全是关于硬件，因为Android当时并不真的在硬件层面竞争，而是在服务层面。你是买一台内置Google服务的Android手机，还是买一台集成苹果服务的iPhone？谷歌虽然也能参与其中，但它必须支付“苹果税”。

What’s interesting is I think that the great mobile holy wars are pretty much over as far as we think, I mean who knows what will happen in the future. The level of competition has kind of further elevated up the stack to the application layer.

而有趣的是，我认为移动领域的“圣战”基本上已经结束了——当然未来还有变数。但竞争已经继续向上游转移，来到“应用层”。

Ben: And services.

Ben：还有服务层。

David: Well, services, some services but like not core level services, not operating system level stuff. It's like are you going to use Uber or Lyft, are you going to spend your attention in Snapchat or in Facebook or in Instagram. These are where money is being made today and this is where the playing field exists. It’s not at the level of the operating system anymore. It’s interesting when people talk – I think this is kind of a red herring at least not in China – but people talked about moving even further up into being on top of the messenger ecosystem. Maybe we’ll see that happen. People are talking bots.

David：对，是一些服务，但不是核心服务，不是操作系统级的东西了。现在的问题是：你会用Uber还是Lyft？你会把注意力放在Snapchat、Facebook 还是Instagram上？这些才是今天真正赚钱、真正有竞争的战场。竞争已经不在操作系统层面了。有些人还谈论更进一步的层级——比如建立在消息平台之上的生态系统。我觉得这在中国之外基本是个“烟雾弹”，但也许未来会真的发生。现在大家都在讨论“聊天机器人”什么的。

Ben: We’re in the early stage of the hype cycle in those.

Ben：这些东西现在正处于炒作周期的早期阶段。

David: Early stage of the hype cycle. But it is definitely a theme that you see in technology that this level of play keeps getting further pushed up the stack.

David：炒作周期的早期阶段。但在科技领域，这确实是一个反复出现的主题：竞争的层级会不断往上移。

Ben: Totally agreed. Well, I think it’s time to grade the acquisition. Before I throw my grade, here’s my reasoning and logic. So Android makes money for Google in two ways. One is advertisement supplied by Google and shown on Android phones. The other is revenue Google takes from its mobile app store, Google Play. And we haven’t talked much about that yet. That’s a nontrivial amount of money.

Ben：完全同意。那么我觉得现在可以来给这笔收购打个分了。在我给出分数之前，先说说我的理由和逻辑。Android为谷歌带来收入的方式有两个：一个是谷歌提供的广告在Android手机上展示，另一个是谷歌从其移动应用商店Google Play中获取的收入。我们之前其实还没怎么谈过后者——但这可不是一笔小钱。

David: Yup.

David：没错。

Ben: Since we’re going off of the data that Oracle opened up in this lawsuit, it's reported that they had $31 billion of revenue per year from Android. So we’ve seen the estimate that $15 billion of that is from mobile search revenue between iOS and Android largely on, I guess so it would be about $12 billion at that because it’s all from Android. Then you have the rest of that is, you know, there’s some amount from the actual phones that they’re selling because Google sells the Nexus phones. But then a lot of that, that top line, $10 to $15 billion of it is from the Google Play Store. And Google keeps 30 percent of that. So let’s say $3 to $4 billion a year is made from the actual Play Store. So that in itself much like how the App Store for Apple is a great business. You know, compared to their other businesses, it’s not insane but that in itself on a $50 million acquisition would be great. But the thing that I think Android really did is ensure that Google was safe for the next decade or two as the world changed out from under them and they were at great risk of losing access to their customers. They engineered a strategy here where they not only went and got a lot of those customers kind of back and made sure that as they transition to mobile, they stayed with direct access to Google and actually even tighter since they’re never on the operating system on desktop, but really where the primary place to go for the developing world as people came online for the first time. So I think Google’s core asset marches on and is well protected and this is an A+.

Ben：根据Oracle诉讼中披露的数据，谷歌每年从Android获得的收入大约是310亿美元。其中估算有150亿美元来自移动搜索收入，这包含了iOS和Android上的流量，我估计Android大概贡献了120亿美元。剩下的收入部分有一部分来自谷歌亲自销售的Nexus手机，但很大一部分——大约100到150亿美元——来自Google Play。而谷歌从Play商店中抽成30%，也就是说他们每年从Play Store拿到30到40亿美元的净收入。像苹果的App Store一样，这本身就是一个很好的生意。虽然和谷歌的搜索相比不算疯狂，但以一个5000万美元的收购成本来看，这已经非常划算了。但我认为Android真正做到的是让谷歌在接下来的10到20年中站稳了脚跟。在整个世界快速变化、谷歌面临失去用户接触点的巨大风险时，他们通过这项战略不仅成功保住了用户，还在移动转型中建立了比桌面时代更直接、更牢固的接触渠道。而且，在发展中国家，人们第一次上网时，Android成为了主要的入口。所以我认为谷歌的核心资产得以延续并受到良好保护——这是一笔A+级的收购。

David: Yeah. For me, the question about grading this is a question whether this is an A or an A+. No doubt this was $50 million for something that is achieved even though it didn’t start this way, but over time achieved everything that we’ve talked about in this episode – for Google, absolutely fantastic. As David Lawee said, “Google’s best deal ever.”

David：是的。对我来说，这笔收购的评分只存在A还是A+的问题。毫无疑问，这是一笔5000万美元的投资，虽然最初并没有清晰的战略目标，但最终却实现了我们这一整集所讨论的一切——对谷歌来说，绝对是极其成功的。正如David Lawee所说的那样：“这是谷歌史上最棒的一笔交易。”

Ben: Yeah, the Goldman numbers has $22 billion in profit last year from the Android division.

Ben：是啊，高盛的报告显示，谷歌去年的Android部门利润达到了220亿美元。

David: Incredible. The thing that I’m wrestling with a little bit is in trying to determine whether to give the plus or not is this was in many ways, again, I don’t think they saw it this way at the time but this was a defensive acquisition; this was not an offensive acquisition. And I’m comparing it with Instagram which is kind of our gold standard here. Instagram is so much simpler than Android.

David：太惊人了。我唯一犹豫“要不要给+”的地方在于，这在很多方面其实是一笔防御性收购，而不是主动出击型的收购。我不认为谷歌当初就是这么想的。我在拿它和Instagram作比较——我们一直把Instagram作为“黄金标准”。Instagram比Android简单太多了。

Ben: I would still say defensive, though.

Ben：我觉得Instagram其实也还是防御性的收购。

David: Well, it’s interesting, right? Like defensive, yes, existentially as I guess Android was in some ways too but not really because people are still going to keep using Google services whether it was on a Google property or not. This was just like preventing them from paying the 30-whatever percent tax and lots of other things too. But Instagram was much more about like, “Oh, we’re going to up-level the playing field now.” Like I was talking about in tech themes, we’re going to move up the stack. I don’t know. I’m struggling with that. Part of me feels like I want to – just the bold part of me wants to reward offensive acquisitions and forward-thinking acquisitions, not that Android wasn’t more than defensive.

David：是啊，这很有意思。说它是防御性的——没错，从生存的角度看某种程度上确实如此，但又不完全是。因为不管是否通过谷歌自有平台，人们还是会继续使用谷歌的服务。这笔交易更多是在避免付出30%那样的“平台税”，当然还有其他考量。但Instagram的收购更多是在说：“我们要抬高竞争层级。”就像我们在“科技主题”里聊到的那样，要把战场推向更上游。所以我其实有些挣扎。一方面，我心里那个欣赏大胆行动的自己，会想去奖励那些进攻型、前瞻性的收购。当然我也承认Android绝不仅仅只是防守。

Ben: Wait, wait, I would still say that Instagram was not a bold, offensive, forward-thinking. Ultimately they sell attention to advertisers and they were at risk of losing all the attention to advertisers.

Ben：等等，我还是觉得Instagram的收购也不是特别“进攻型”或“前瞻性”。说到底，他们的本质业务就是向广告商兜售用户注意力，而他们当时正面临将全部注意力流失的风险。

David: Which is the same that Facebook sells.

David：没错，Facebook的商业模式也是一样的。

Ben: Facebook, Instagram, and Google all do the same thing. They all sell attention to advertisers.

Ben：Facebook、Instagram和谷歌其实做的是一回事：他们都在卖“注意力”给广告商。

David: Yup.

David：对。

Ben: I think it’s interesting like Facebook’s move was defensive in that they wanted to make sure that they captured Instagram’s attention and can sell that to advertisers too. Google knew that they were going to keep getting the attention but basically wanted to save their margin.

Ben：所以很有意思的是，Facebook买Instagram，其实也是出于防御目的——他们想确保把Instagram上的注意力也掌握在手里，然后继续卖给广告主。而谷歌知道自己还是能拿到注意力，但他们想保住利润空间。

David: Yup. And platform on which to do it. Yeah, I’m struggling. I think it’s an A+.

David：对，还有获取用户的基础平台。所以我还是有些挣扎。但我觉得这确实是A+。

Ben: He says it in a very defeated tone.

Ben：（笑）听起来你说这话的时候好像很“沮丧”。

David: I’m defeated, I’m limping into the A+ here, Ben. But which makes me think, I don’t want to be limping into the A+. I want to be charging into the A+.

David：是啊，我承认有点“败下阵来”的感觉，Ben。我是“跛着脚”给出A+的。但说到底，我希望是“昂首挺胸”地给出这个A+。

Ben: Okay. What acquisition ever is an A+?

Ben：那我们来想想，到底哪笔收购真正配得上A+？

David: Instagram.

David：Instagram。

Ben: I mean Android has already made a lot more money for Google than Instagram has for Facebook.

Ben：但Android给谷歌赚的钱，可比Instagram给Facebook赚的多得多啊。

David: But I think this is what I’m having a hard time with and maybe it’s just semantics. But Android has saved Google a lot of money. Instagram has made Facebook a lot of money. You know what I’m saying?

David：但我觉得我卡住的地方在这儿——也许只是措辞的问题。Android是帮谷歌“省了很多钱”，而Instagram是“帮Facebook赚了很多钱”。你懂我意思吧？

Ben: Yeah, I’ll buy in on that. Yeah, Android is effectively a margin saver.

Ben：嗯，我认同你的说法。Android本质上是一个“利润率保护器”。

David: Yeah. Whereas Instagram is like this is a new revenue engine for Facebook.

David：对。而Instagram是一个新的“收入引擎”。

Ben: Yeah, presuming that Google would have gotten the queries from all the new people that were lighting up and basically new people coming online for the first time.

Ben：对，你的前提是——假设就算没有Android，谷歌还是能从所有这些新上线的用户那里拿到搜索流量。

David: All right, here’s what I’m going to say. Android is my new gold standard for defensive acquisitions and is an A+ in that regard. I still like to play offense more than defense.

David：好，我来总结一下。Android现在是我评判“防御型收购”的新黄金标准，在这方面它是A+。尽管我个人还是更偏爱“进攻型”策略多过防守。

Ben: All right. It’s interesting because at the time – we just keep going back to this – I don’t think it was defensive when they bought it. But what it ends up turning out to be is one of the most incredible defensive plays of all time.

Ben：好吧。有趣的是，我们反复在回顾这一点——谷歌当初收购Android时，我觉得它并不是出于防御目的。但它最终却成为史上最精彩的防御性战略之一。

David: On that note.

David：说到这儿。

Ben: On that note.

Ben：正好顺着这个话题。

David: Let’s move quickly into follow-ups. So sticking with Google, a couple episodes we covered Waze. This is one of those quirks of history on our show that I think we spoke too soon here. We are going to have to do a full follow-up episode on this. Maybe on automotive technology generally at some point. But within the last couple of weeks, Google and Waze announced that they are now doing ride sharing within Waze. The product is slightly different but competing with Uber and Lyft too, but competing with Uber. Interestingly which Google is a major shareholder in Uber. David Drummond, Google’s head of corp dev and chief legal officer, was on Uber’s board and resigned after this happened. What do you think?

David：我们快速进入“后续更新”部分。还是说谷歌。我们前几期节目讲过Waze，我现在觉得我们当时可能说得太早了，历史的发展又出现了巧合。我们可能得专门再做一期后续，甚至可能顺便聊聊整个汽车技术领域。因为就在过去几周，谷歌和Waze宣布，现在Waze将加入拼车功能。这个产品略有不同，但的确开始和Uber、Lyft展开竞争，尤其是Uber。更有意思的是，谷歌本身还是Uber的大股东之一。谷歌负责企业发展的主管兼首席法务官David Drummond原来在Uber董事会里，在这事之后已经辞职。你怎么看？

Ben: Our assertion with the Waze episode was that mostly they were using Waze data but not doing massive reinvestments in that product to make Google Maps better and potentially provide data for their self-driving car stuff. What they’re showing now is that they’re actually using Waze –

Ben：我们在Waze那期节目里的观点是，谷歌主要是拿Waze的数据来用，并没有在这个产品上做太多再投资，只是为了让Google Maps变得更好，或者为自动驾驶项目提供数据支持。而现在他们展示出来的是，他们实际上真的在用Waze——

David: They’re playing offense, not just defense here.

David：他们现在在打进攻战了，不再只是防守。

Ben: Yeah, to introduce new products and try new things. Not only is it a new thing that is interesting, it’s probably the most interesting new thing that they’re doing that they’re rolling out through and they’ve chosen Waze.

Ben：对，他们现在用Waze来推出新产品、尝试新东西。而且不仅是“有趣的新东西”，这可能还是他们最近推出的最有趣的新项目，而他们选择用Waze来落地。

David: And they’ve chosen Waze, yeah. Super interesting. Not Google Maps.

David：而且他们选的是Waze，不是Google Maps，这点特别有意思。

Ben: The question is like so they’re going to do their car sharing through Waze. Right now their self-driving cars are much more of an independent thing. Does that mean that they do a self-driving car service rolled out through Waze instead of through other –

Ben：问题是，他们现在通过Waze做拼车服务，而目前自动驾驶项目还是相对独立的。那这是否意味着他们未来会通过Waze来推出自动驾驶打车服务，而不是用其他平台？

David: Well, I wonder here too how much the fact that Google is a huge shareholder in Uber, and David Drummond was on Uber’s board, played into the decision to do this through Waze here. Like oh, this is this company that is still standalone, they’re based in Israel and Waze had rolled out ride sharing in Israel long ago. The news was that they brought it to San Francisco. So this is sort of like our independent division doing this, not related to Google corporate, and so like a head fake here. If Google were not an investor in Uber, would they have rolled this out through Google Maps?

David：我也在想，这里是不是因为谷歌是Uber的大股东，David Drummond又曾是Uber董事会成员，这才让他们决定用Waze来推进拼车？就像是：Waze作为一家仍然相对独立的公司，总部在以色列，而且很早就在以色列推出了拼车服务，现在只是把这个服务带到了旧金山。这就好像是“我们这个独立小团队在做，跟Google母公司没关系”，有点像打个“烟雾弹”。如果谷歌不是Uber的投资人，他们会不会选择直接用Google Maps来推出？

Ben: Huh. I don’t know. An unrelated question is, is it actually that much different than what already existed in their Israeli product and that they just decided like, “Yeah, we’ll try it here too.” Is it actually as big a deal as the press and we are now making it out to be?

Ben：唔，这我也不知道。换个角度问——这个旧金山的拼车服务和他们在以色列已经有的产品相比，真的有那么大不同吗？也许他们只是觉得，“我们这套系统已经有了，那干脆在这里也试试看。”我们和媒体现在渲染的那种“大新闻”，是不是真的值得？

David: Well, Uber thinks it’s a big deal for sure.

David：嗯，至少Uber觉得这事不小。

Ben: Yeah, that’s true. To continue our mention from earlier about how fast things change, like friends become enemies very quickly when things like this happen.

Ben：是啊，这倒是真的。也呼应我们前面提到的，变化之快——朋友瞬间就可能变成敌人，尤其遇到这种事。

David: As we saw with Apple and Google, yeah. New markets create a lot of competition.

David：正如我们在苹果和谷歌的例子里看到的那样。新市场带来新的竞争。

Ben: In five years, who is Uber using as their Maps provider on Android?

Ben：那我们设想一下：再过五年，Uber在Android上用的是谁的地图服务？

David: A hundred percent Uber.

David：百分百是Uber自己的。

Ben: Yeah.

Ben：对。

David: Actually a lot of Uber driver rides that I take now, the drivers are using the native Uber navigation and now switching over to Waze or Google Maps.

David：事实上，我现在打Uber车的时候，很多司机已经在用Uber内置的导航，而不是切换到Waze或Google Maps。

Ben: But you still need the core Maps product underneath even if their navigation is –

Ben：但就算导航界面是自家的，他们底层还是需要一套地图数据支持的，对吧？

David: Yeah, but Uber bought – I’m liking on who they bought, but they bought some assets from Nokia, I believe.

David：对，但Uber不是买了……我现在记不清名字了，好像是从诺基亚那边收购了一些资产。

Ben: The Here Maps?

Ben：是Here Maps吗？

David: Yeah.

David：对，就是它。

Ben: They’re part of that conglomerate, yeah.

Ben：他们现在就是Here Maps那个联盟的一部分。

David: Yup. All right. Quick hot take. Not an acquisition but we thought it would be fun to talk about especially given the content of this episode. Apple’s big event – launching the iPhone 7 and AirPods.

David：好，快速点评一下。虽然这不是收购，但考虑到我们这集的主题，我们觉得聊聊也挺有意思的。苹果刚举行了发布会——推出了iPhone 7和AirPods。

Ben: AirPods, yeah. I mean we’re just seeing the full maturation of mobile. It’s interesting to see phones are where laptops were 10 years ago. It starts to open the question for what’s next. Like I got excited, I bought one. Of course that was going to happen. It’s going to be an incredible product. All the changes that are made are largely incremental except for their continued breakthrough advancements with the cameras which I’m super excited about. I heard another interesting point that this could be Apple’s soft foray into the VR capture.

Ben：AirPods，是啊。我们正在见证移动设备的全面成熟。现在的手机，就像十年前的笔记本电脑。这也开始引发“下一个是什么？”的问题。我是挺兴奋的，我也买了——肯定会买的，这将是一款非常棒的产品。除了相机方面的持续突破让我特别期待以外，其他的改进大多还是渐进式的。我还听到另一个有趣观点，说这可能是苹果在VR内容采集上的一次“温和试探”。

David: Because of the dual camera system on the Plus.

David：是因为Plus机型上的双摄系统，对吧？

Ben: Yeah, yeah, that that’s something that’s kind of going on the side a little bit. Apple just launched a phone that will be in hundreds of millions of people’s hands that has two cameras and they can kind of do some interesting things with software with that later. Who knows?

Ben：对对，这有点像一个边线动作。苹果刚发布了一款手机，会被数亿人使用，而且它带有双摄像头——他们之后完全可以通过软件做出一些非常有意思的东西。谁知道呢？

David: So here’s what’s really interesting to me about the Apple event last week. I’m really surprised that people aren’t talking about this or maybe just not people I’m following are talking about this. Apple is super secretive about their roadmap, what they do, they don’t talk about anything. But they do drop these hints and if you listen closely to what they’re saying, it’s usually not a surprise what they end up doing. I was really struck when they were talking about AirPods and talking about the removal of the headphone jack and everybody’s focusing on the courage, right? Like yeah, that was probably a poor choice of words. But here’s what I think they’re saying. I think they’re saying like we are moving with maybe it’s the next iPhone, maybe it’s two down the road or maybe this happens incrementally, we’re moving to a world where there are no wires. There’s no cord to your earphones. There’s no power cord. There’s nothing tethering you and that means that the device is actually kind of secondary and if you look at the AirPods, you know, double tap to activate Siri, like we’re moving to a world where computing is just on you, part of you, around you all the time. People have been talking about this, this is what Amazon is doing with Alexa. But that to me was a really strong message from Apple that coming soon, Siri which we’ve done our episode on Siri and Ben and I are very skeptical of Apple on this, like Siri is going to control your computing experience. It may or may not be through a screen.

David：对我来说，上周苹果发布会上真正有意思的是——我很惊讶大家没怎么谈这个，或者是我关注的那些人没在谈。苹果一直对自己的产品路线非常保密，从不透露什么。但他们确实会给出一些暗示。如果你认真听他们的措辞，其实他们最后做什么往往并不意外。这次在介绍AirPods和取消耳机插孔的时候，大家都在关注他们提到的那个词——“勇气”，对吧？当然，那可能不是个理想的用词。但我觉得他们真正想表达的是：我们正在迈入一个“无线的世界”——也许是下一代iPhone，也许再过两代，或者是逐步发生——耳机没有线，电源没有线，任何设备都不会再有束缚。设备本身变得“次要”。你看AirPods，双击激活Siri——我们正在进入一个“计算体验就在你身上、与你融为一体、始终陪伴”的时代。人们早就谈论这个了，Amazon用Alexa就是在干这件事。但对我来说，苹果这次释放了一个非常强烈的信号：很快，Siri将成为你的计算入口。我们做过一期关于Siri的节目，我和Ben对苹果这块很怀疑。但未来的计算体验很可能就是通过Siri来控制，可能有屏幕，也可能根本没有。

Ben: Yeah, expect more chips and AirPods 2 and AirPods 3 and AirPods 7. Get excited because you won’t need a phone, and we’ll go from there.

Ben：对，等着看吧——AirPods 2、AirPods 3、AirPods 7都来了，芯片越来越多。让人兴奋的是，你将不再需要手机，我们也会顺势跟上。

David: We’ll go from there. All right, that’s our hot take. Carve Out?

David：我们就从这开始吧。好了，这是我们的快速点评环节。Carve Out时间？

Ben: Mine’s quick. Reading a really cool book right now. It’s called Business Adventures by John Brooks.

Ben：我这次很快。我最近在读一本非常棒的书，叫《Business Adventures》（《商业冒险》），作者是John Brooks。

David: Oh, so good.

David：哦，那本太棒了。

Ben: It’s short vignettes, maybe like 20-30 pages each that are stories of incredible things that happened in business over the last 100 years. The first couple are awesome. The 1962 stock market crash talking about the impact of the fact that trades were happening at a higher velocity than could be printed out, so no one knew what price they were buying things for when they put in a buy order and a sell order on some of these crazy crash days. The second chapter that I’m on right now is the colossal failure of the Ford Edsel.

Ben：这本书是由一些短篇故事组成的，大约每篇20到30页，讲述的是过去100年间商业界发生的一些不可思议的事件。前几章特别精彩。第一章讲的是1962年的股灾，当时交易速度太快，甚至比纸质打印出来的速度还快，结果是人们在股灾当天下单买入或卖出时，根本不知道自己成交的价格是多少。第二章是我现在读到的部分，讲的是福特Edsel汽车的巨大失败。

David: That’s a good one.

David：那一章很好看。

Ben: The history and how that came to be. Just super great and really nice if you’re doing a lot of short flights or something like that where you can go knock out 30 pages, then you won’t pick it up again for a month or something and don’t want to forget. They’re very kind of bite-sized.

Ben：它讲述了那段历史以及Edsel是如何失败的。这本书真的非常棒，也很适合像出差那种短途飞行时读，一次读完30页，然后放一个月再捡起来也不会觉得断档。这些故事都很“轻便”。

David: This is a great book recommended to me a while back by my buddy, Matt Nerlinger who’s at AVP which is a growth VC firm in San Francisco. This I believe is one of Bill Gates’ favorite books, and I think his favorite business book.

David：这本书是我以前的朋友Matt Nerlinger推荐给我的，他在旧金山的一家成长型风投公司AVP工作。这本书我记得是比尔·盖茨最喜欢的书之一，应该是他最喜欢的商业书。

Ben: Yeah, he’s endorsed it on the cover. It’s a pretty killer endorsement.

Ben：对，盖茨还在封面上为它背书了。这个背书分量可不轻。

David: Hard to beat that. Mine is also quick. It is the ESPN OJ documentary. It is so good. Have you seen this, Ben?

David：确实没人比得上这个背书。我这次推荐的也很快：是ESPN出品的OJ辛普森纪录片。这部片子真的太棒了。你看过吗，Ben？

Ben: No, but you were telling me about that.

Ben：没有，但你之前跟我提过。

David: Everybody’s got to watch this. It is a 5-part documentary series. Jenny, my wife and I are in the midst of watching it now. We’re through the first 3 parts. So good. It’s like 30-40 percent about OJ and the rest, the majority about what was going on in America from the Civil Rights Movement in the ‘60s up through the ‘90s and specifically like in LA, race relations in LA, the police in LA, I mean this is where NWA was, you know. There’s so much deep history here that’s not people know about but this just such a fantastic job covering it. Also, I didn’t realize for people kind of Ben and my age, OJ just like, it’s the trial, right? That’s all we think about him. But he was an incredible football player. Like head and shoulders above everybody else. So, really great to watch. I highly recommend to everybody. All right, that’s what we got for you.

David：大家一定要去看。这是一部5集的纪录片系列。我和我太太Jenny正在追剧，目前看到第3集，太精彩了。大概30-40%内容是讲OJ本人的，其余大部分是在讲60年代民权运动以来一直到90年代美国的社会状况，特别是洛杉矶——洛杉矶的种族关系、警察系统等等。别忘了，这可是NWA的地方。这里面有非常多深层次的历史，很多人其实并不了解，而这部纪录片讲得非常好。而且，我也没意识到——像我和Ben这种年龄层的人，对OJ的印象基本就停留在那个审判上。但其实他曾是一位极其优秀的橄榄球运动员，远远领先于其他人。真的很值得一看，强烈推荐。好了，我们这集内容就到这儿。

Ben: If you aren’t subscribed and you want to hear more, you can subscribe from your favorite podcast client and if you feel so inclined, we would love a review on iTunes and if you want to share this episode, tweet about it, put it on Facebook, tell your coworkers, yeah, really appreciate it as a listener. Thanks so much.

Ben：如果你还没有订阅但想听更多内容，可以在你喜欢的播客平台上订阅我们。如果你愿意的话，我们也非常欢迎你在iTunes上给我们打个评分，或者把这期节目发推、分享到Facebook，告诉你的同事朋友们。作为听众，我们真的非常感谢你的支持。

David: Thanks to everybody. We’ll see you next time.

David：感谢大家，我们下次见。

Ben: See you next time.

Ben：下次见。

Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

注：Acquired的主持人与嘉宾可能持有本期节目中提到的相关资产。本播客并非投资建议，仅供信息和娱乐用途。在考虑任何金融交易时，请务必自行研究并独立决策。