Dogfood. Ever heard that term?
It’s the idea behind a lot of Google’s services. When a company eats its own dog food, they’re confident enough in their product to have the entire team use it. For a tech company, that’s especially useful: employees can surface bugs, provide feedback, and inform future development from firsthand experience. That’s exactly what happened for Google staffers at the end of 2008.
Rather than a monetary year-end bonus, Google employees received Dream handsets. Everyone gets a phone. The devices were designed specifically for Googlers, with a “droid” logo on the back, and were unlocked for use with any carrier. Without SIM cards out of the box, they worked immediately as Wi-Fi devices.
The Dream was essentially identical to, or very close to, the Android Dev Phone 1. Given that some Google employees reportedly received thousands of dollars in year-end bonuses in prior years, a device worth roughly $400 might have felt modest to some. For developers and tech enthusiasts outside the Googleplex, it would have been a welcome gift.
Google’s goal was straightforward: get the hardware into the hands of their own people, let savvy engineers and designers use it daily, and see what ideas come out of it. The platform could only benefit from that kind of internal feedback loop.
