Now A No-Evil Zone

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/03/15/Joining-Google

by wglb • 16 years ago

102 76 16 years ago

aditya• 16 years ago

tl;dr Tim Bray is going to google to work on Android from Vancouver because he thinks Android is great.

I’d like to think that Hacker News is the kind of community that doesn’t need a tl;dr before they dive into the comments…

ubernostrum2• 16 years ago

To be honest, that summary was about as long as the article needed to be. There really wasn't anything else in it which hadn't been covered either in previous posts on Tim's blog or in the general atmosphere here (do we really need yet another "Walled gardens are evil!!!!!!1", when that's been rehashed so many times already?).

dbz• 16 years ago

I found this piece very interesting =]

Joining Google for Andriod- yet never making a useful Application for it. I wonder what he will be doing exactly...

bretthoerner• 16 years ago

I think Bray is mostly an evangelist at this point.

Kilimanjaro• 16 years ago

And a very good at that. Just his first post made me want to learn about android right away, even if I consider the iPhone a way superior experience.

gvb• 16 years ago

While "no useful app" may be strictly accurate, he has written app(s) and blogged his experiences.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/12/18/Android-Di...

[edit: Direct link to Android Diaries" rather than a google search]

ilamont• 16 years ago

His description of the iPhone universe:

"It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger."

Unfortunately for Android, many or even most consumers prefer a Disney-fied experience. Can Android achieve that without the walled-garden approach?

davidw5• 16 years ago

One area where Android might easily be very successful is for businesses that need to do custom things, and don't want Apple sticking its nose in their affairs.

pvg5• 16 years ago

This exists, for large businesses -

http://developer.apple.com/programs/iphone/enterprise/

In house apps can be distributed without the App Store.

mseebach2• 16 years ago

At the moment, yes. But the Android experience is rapidly improving, and all it takes is one single killer app that's not possible on the iPhone because of the walled garden approach.

One such killer-app could be the competition on the handsets. I have an HTC Tattoo - it's a low-end device, compared to Nexus One and HTC Hero, and it feels cheap, but it packs the entire smart-phone experience. And it's less than $200 (subsidised on the plan I'm getting anyway) and falling.

btipling• 16 years ago

Probably a porn app.

jokermatt9992• 16 years ago

Wasn't that supposed to be Google Voice?

troystribling• 16 years ago

I thought turn-by-turn navigation might be that app, free and better on android, but hard to say if there has been an impact.

Tichy2• 16 years ago

"Unfortunately for Android, many or even most consumers prefer a Disney-fied experience."

Even so, there is still the other consumers. I simply can't help the Disney-fied consumers.

Consumers also like to eat candy all day and watch TV, but I don't want to feed them candy and TV because I know it is not healthy. Should be possible to find some business model that I can also agree with.

dejb• 16 years ago

History shows that walled-garden approaches are severely limited in their scope. They don't scale. If you read the article it says

> As of now, they’re selling around 90K iPhones per day compared to around 60K Android handsets. It’s a horse race!

If those figures are accurate then it's not a horse race. The iPhone is dead. Do the math on growth rates. The iPhone is dead as the dominant platform and will soon occupy the small niche that its closed nature consigns it to.

barrkel2• 16 years ago

That was the visceral feeling I got about a day after I received my Nexus One. It's Mac vs Windows all over again.

pvg5• 16 years ago

I'm somewhat surprised he's chosen to take such a dump on his own credibility. I'm sure he has genuine misgivings about the way Apple's App Store process works. But this level of breathless hyperbole in the same post as an announcement that he now works for an iPhone competitor is like titling your blog entry "I am now a shill". Just a year ago he wrote

"The iPhone has proved that a mobile device can really truly be a first-class citizen of the Net."

ZeroGravitas• 16 years ago

He's been saying the same thing for at least 7 years:

Are You a Sharecropper? · If you’re developing software for the Windows platform, yes. Or for the Apple platform, or the Oracle platform, or the SAP platform, or, well, any platform that is owned and operated by a company. They own the ground you’re building on, and if they decide they don’t like you, or they can do something better with the ground, you’re toast. They can ship their own product and give it away till you go bust, then start charging for it; and use secret APIs you can’t see; and they can break the published APIs you use. All of these things have historically been done by platform vendors.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...

ynniv• 16 years ago

For the love of pete, the iPhone "Internet experience" has no parallels to any Disney product. Apple has basic restrictions on the types of native apps that can run on it, and they are far more permissive than "child friendly". Additionally, there is no restriction on Web browsing at all... This marks yet another article I stopped reading because the author said something clearly emotional and not rational.

ananthrk• 16 years ago

OT: Just curios. Would someone like Tim Bray (who is well-known and has a reputation) be required to take part in the technical interviews that other Googlers go through?

EDIT: better phrasing

simonw• 16 years ago

From the article, it sounds like it. "I think I talked to eleven people in the course of my day there, failing one logic puzzle but acing the what-does-a-browser-actually-do test." - sounds like my Google interview a few years ago.

rimantas2• 16 years ago

Looks like this kind of comparison is there to stay:

  As of now, they’re selling around 90K iPhones per day
  compared to around 60K Android handsets. It’s a horse race!

How about "they're selling X Macbook Air's compared to Y Win machines". Does this version sound right?

romland• 16 years ago

I don't consider the comparison wrong in this context. We are talking about Operating Systems here. Not phones.

In other contexts it might be wrong, however.

rimantas2• 16 years ago

Even in this case iPhone OS sells only on two devices (so far) and Android is on ~20 I assume.

jokermatt9992• 16 years ago

Not including the iPod Touch is a mistake, in my opinion. Also, you have to account for the issues with apps on different versions of Android. I'd love this competition to be as close as the article makes it out to be, but I don't think it's there quite yet.

dalore2• 16 years ago

Android might be catching up, but it is also fragmented. When developing for Android you don't know what features the phone has. It's going the way of Java Mobile.

newsit• 16 years ago

I know I'll get my ... kicked for this comment, but anyway.

The iPhone experience is not sterile at all. It comes with a browser and there is no restriction for the websites you can open. Google ('the web is the computer') should be the ones to best understand this.

Since when is controlling the quality and security of the content at a marketplace that you operate equal to limiting people's freedoms?

If I own a grocery shop and refuse to sell someone's rotten tomatoes does it make me necessary evil? Not letting people charge 0.99$ for balloons in swimwear using your own infrastructure has nothing to do with their freedom of speech. They can always create a web page and show it to the world.

dalore2• 16 years ago

Try open one of them flash based porn sites.

somebear• 16 years ago

There are porn sites that have started supporting H.264, possibly in order to cater to the iPhone users, although I have no data to back up that assumption.

isleyaardvark• 16 years ago

The iPhone's web browser supports open standards. I'm not too upset it doesn't support a closed (if popular) format.

Not only that but I'd say the iPhone/iPad will give the biggest boost to HTML5 video, due to increased demand.

hackoder• 16 years ago

I dont think there's an issue with controlling the quality and security of the content at a marketplace. Its an issue that its the _only_ marketplace that they're controlling.

jhancock• 16 years ago

Sounds like you've never lived in a communist country; where the government decides there shall be one and only one marketplace for a certain set of goods/services.

You are severally missing the point of the problem with Apple's App Store. It has absolutely nothing to do with what they will or will not allow in their store and what developers must do to get their apps published. It has nothing to do with Apple deciding 30% is the price of admission.

It has everything to do with Apple ensuring there can be only one market. This is the antithesis of a free market.

cschneid7• 16 years ago

Am I the only techie who DOESN'T want another totally open device? I have a mac, a windows pc, another mac laptop, my girlfriend's computer, my girlfriend's mom's linux system, etc. I already provide tech support to some degree or another for all of them.

I don't want another device I have to understand to the core in order to avoid viruses, trojan apps, and other mundane problems.

I want a damn phone that runs a few apps. I like that I can outsource most of my worries to Apple, and let them worry about it, and the price is that I don't have root.

I wonder how we can make both sides happy: both my side of "I know what I'm doing, but I don't want to do it.", and "It's my toy, let me do what I want". I see the merits of both, but I worry even about putting a "unlock me please" button in the settings panes somewhere, since it will end up with phones trojaned, dialing 1-900 numbers so the owner could have a cute animated cat on their unlock screen.

jrockway• 16 years ago

The iPhone has more viruses than Android.

mechanical_fish• 16 years ago

Link, please.

cschneid7• 16 years ago

I know there have been security holes in the iphone, and there will be in Android as well. The big thing I worry about are real trojans like: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2010/01/11/banking-trojan-...

Beyond that, there's another article on HN front page that talks about the painfulness of upgrades to the android OS, and how various phones run different versions.

My basic thing was that yes, I can understand it, but I don't want to worry. I just want a phone, that runs some chunk of apps. The lack of management capability is a feature, as well as a handcuff.

jherdman2• 16 years ago

Pardon my confusion, but I fail to see how the openness of the device has anything to do with your experience with it. An open device merely ensures that you have the freedom to do with it what you want, not that you have to do anything with it, or that you even need to understand it.

Consider the browser I'm using right now: Chrome. I don't understand how V8 or Webkit works, but my experience on Chrome isn't complicated, nor is it necessary that I understand these components. However, should I choose, I can educate myself and take control of my browser.

cschneid7• 16 years ago

Turn that around, and you get a system like windows, where I can install, run, change anything (with the right permissions), and you end up with a mass of trojan software that installs itself at a low level, resists removal, and such. I like the fact I can hand an iphone (or ipad) to my mom, my grandma, or whatever, and be confident that they won't be "tricked" into installing malware that looks attractive.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the appeal of an open system to us techies, but I like that I never have to worry, or manage the system myself. I do enough of it already.

gaius2• 16 years ago

OK, but that's not relevant. You know why Outlook is vulnerable? Because it's openly scriptable. If you can convince someone to run your script, they can do whatever they like, so name it AnnaKournikovaNekkid.exe and many, many people were convinced. And that's the key: an open device in the hands of someone who doesn't thoroughly understand it merely creates problems for those that do.

wglb• 16 years ago

A word from the poster.

I didn't expect to see the focus of this article on a debate between open and closed and between google and apple.

I found it interesting because I have followed Tim's blog, if only sporadically, for some time now. I have a lot of respect for him, as he is a visionary , and has worked on some of the relevant technologies of our time: 1) Author of one of the first search engines 2) co-author of the XML standard 3) technically very savy fellow.

What I have been wondering about his tenure at sun and his subsequent decision timed deliciously to leave sun just before he became an oracle employee is how it might foretell the future of the sun technologies and how oracle decides to treat the sun legacy.

acangiano• 16 years ago

They asked freakin' Tim Bray how a browser works. That's a bit overzealous if you ask me. I hope they withheld questions about XML at the very least.

I wonder if they asked logic puzzles and the like to Peter Norvig as well. I can already imagine the interview.

25 yr old interviewer: "What sorting algorithm would you use to sort a billion integers?"

Norvig: "Son, ..."

Now A No-Evil Zone

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