In January 2008, Apple CEO Steve Jobs made a Sunday morning call to Google Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra to raise an urgent design concern about the Google logo on the iPhone. Gundotra was in church when he received the voicemail.
Jobs had noticed that the yellow shade in the second “O” of the Google icon did not render correctly on the iPhone screen. The issue was minor, but for Jobs and his well-known design obsession, even a small colour mismatch mattered.
The concern was not about Google’s official branding. The global logo remained unchanged. What bothered Apple CEO was the way the icon appeared on the iPhone display. He believed the yellow gradient looked slightly off.
Jobs had already asked Apple's Senior Director of Human Interface, Greg Christie, to review the icon. Soon after speaking to Gundotra, Christie sent an email titled “Icon Ambulance” with updated gradient files. Google implemented the correction quickly.
Apple and Google were close partners during that time. Google Maps and YouTube were pre-loaded on the original iPhone. The story is about cooperation, not competition. The story became public knowledge in August 2011.
Google Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra told it a day after Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple. Gundotra said it was a story about product leadership and attention to detail.
“CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday,” Gundotra wrote. The story has come up many times over the years as part of conversations about Jobs, the iPhone, and leadership. It is a compelling story about how details make products in the tech world.