August 19, 2004: Google floats its initial public offering on the stock market. The Google IPO cements the company’s status as a tech giant, as founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin turn into instant billionaires.
Relations between Google and Apple are good at the time, with Apple CEO Steve Jobs serving as a mentor to the search company’s two young founders. Google’s Eric Schmidt soon will join Apple’s board of directors. However, the peace won’t last long.
Google IPO: Birth of a major rivalry
Looking back at Google’s war with Apple, what strikes me are the similarities to the Microsoft-versus-Apple feud of the 1980s and ’90s. In both cases, the companies started off as friends.
The leaders of Apple’s eventual foes at first deeply admired Jobs and the company he co-founded. Later, both Microsoft and Google eventually took on Apple directly with a rival product (Windows for Microsoft, Android for Google).
In both cases, that product proved vastly inferior initially. However, both gained ground due to openness and their products’ ability to be used by multiple hardware makers.
After Google’s successful IPO, the company became Jobs’ final adversary. During his long career, the Apple maverick always found some big (usually design-challenged) establishment villain to fight. That is certainly the way Jobs defined Google, as recorded in Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple CEO.
Jobs grouped Google with IBM and Microsoft as a “force for evil” instead of innovation. He also labeled Android — Google’s answer to iOS — “grand theft” and threatened “thermonuclear war” against the company.
Apple vs. Google
Two decades after the Google IPO, relations between Apple and Google appear somewhat improved, with much of the legal animosity between the two having cooled considerably. Still, Apple’s ongoing efforts to help users protect their privacy hurts Google’s ad business, which depends on tracking everything anybody does online.
The two companies will continue to compete into the foreseeable future. And a 2024 antitrust ruling will stop Google from paying billions per year to obtain the default search position in Apple’s Safari web browser.
Nonetheless, the successful Google IPO — in which 22 million shares opened at $85 and ended the day at $100.34 — became a landmark in the history of tech. And Apple history, too.
Also today in Apple history
August 19, 1985: Apple had a falling out with “how to” book publishers after deciding not to release MacBASIC, its version of the programming language for the Macintosh. The software had been in development since 1982, with various betas released. But Apple ditched it at the last minute — upsetting publishers who already finished books on the topic.
“We feel they’ve led us down the garden path, but there’s nothing we can do,” an editorial director of publisher Osborne/McGraw-Hill said.
August 19, 1996: Microsoft announced the opening of a Silicon Valley lab focused on developing Internet Explorer 2.0 and 3.0 for the Macintosh. Pundits hailed it as yet another piece of evidence that the war between the two sides was over.
Also on August 19, 1996: Apple unveiled the G3 chip (Cupertino’s name for its PowerPC 750 chip). Advertised as vastly superior to Intel’s Pentium II processor, the new chip most notably powered the revolutionary original iMac.
We originally published this post on the Google IPO on August 19, 2017.
