
Chrome devs deny Jeff Nelson's role in the creation of Chrome OS - MatthewPhillips
https://plus.google.com/u/0/114128403856330399812/posts/iVc7e3tipcF
======
ChuckMcM
Its funny, because reading this had me chuckling.

I too created ChromeOS :-) Let me explain;

So I joined Google in 2006 (December) and one of the things I had pitched to a
few folks before joining was something I was calling "JaDE" which was short
for "Java Application Development Environment". Nearly everyone I pitched it
to thought it was just a 'thin client' ala Citrix's offering, and Brad
Templeton called it a 'diskless workstation' as he knew my history with Sun
and Sun's flirtation with that sort of thing in the early 90's.

I didn't think it anything like that at the time, thinking instead of it as a
sort of appliance like client rather than diskless (it had local flash
storage), it was basically what smartphones became, but with a keyboard and
display[1]. When Android was being developed and a number of people in the
platforms area were getting excited about it, I talked with the Android folks
about forking it into something along the ideas of my JaDE concept. They
weren't very receptive, they had a phone to build. I did the usual stuff,
created a p page [2], put some stuff in the wiki etc. Also saw Jeff Nelson's
previous work (which had gone nowhere), read the politics around the whole
Android effort at the time and abandoned my efforts to push it any further.

Other projects inside of Google with that level of detail did get pushed
further by people interested in moving the ball down the road. When one of the
platform folks left to join this "secret" group which turned out to be
ChromeOS I was amused because yet another group of people had figured out
what, by then, was a pretty obvious idea. Since I happened to have a
compatible ASUS Eeepc at the time I downloaded one of their early builds and
played around with it. When they got some traction inside the company the
Android group went ape shit (as expected) and that led to some interesting
changes.

But lets come back to Jeff for a moment. He was at Google for 2 years
according to his LinkedIn profile, which means he joined, got slotted, and
left. (a common path sadly). But he is also currently the CTO of 'stealth
startup' which means he is out pitching to investors with his co-founder(s).
Its so much better to pitch as the 'inventor of ChromeOS' than it is as '2
years at Google, then consulting for 4 years.'

I clearly remember he had a 'p' page for his project (I found it when I was
thinking about my version of the idea) so he may be assuming that someone read
it and said "Hey this is a pretty good idea, we should build this." And
started building it. Since it was never a good idea at Google to give anyone
else credit for your ideas perhaps Jeff is making some unwarranted
assumptions. I could easily see him believing whole heartedly that he invented
it, just like I can believe nobody in the ChromeOS group has ever heard of
him.

Google is just that kind of place.

UPDATE: see the patent claim in a sibling comment, that is priceless!

[1] Yet another case of being too early!

[2] Internal database of "projects" being worked on.

~~~
Stratoscope
Fascinating story, Chuck, thanks for the insights.

One dumb question: can you translate "got slotted"? I'm guessing it has to do
what team you end up in, but I have a feeling there may be a more nuanced
meaning to it?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Sorry, Google tried to solve the problem of 'mismatched' titles in their own
unique way. Since "Senior Engineer" at some persons previous job might not
compare to what Google called a "Senior Engineer", Google delayed determining
what your "pay grade" was until after you had done some work.

So Google would hire you, you would spend 6 months being useless trying to
figure out what the heck was going on, then you'd get on a starter project or
some first "real" project, and 12 to 18 months later your manager would put
you in front of a committee of folks who would look at your work output, and
then pick what "slot" you were.

If you were slotted "lower" than you had been hired at, they had a talk with
you (and it meant you couldn't get a pay raise until you had been promoted
twice). It also had an annoying tendency to slot people who had been
"Principal Engineer" or "Distinguished Engineer" at a previous company into
"Junior Engineer" at Google, which really pissed them off (and sometimes lead
to "management action" in the form of a formalized "performance improvement
plan").

Basically the more senior you were, the more likely you were to wash out.
Since Jeff was a "Principle Engineer" at eBay prior to Google I'm _guessing_
that this was his path as well. Probably got slotted as 'senior engineer'
(which is three levels below Google's equivalent of Principal Engineer) and
said "Screw this, I've paid my dues already, see ya!" But that is just
speculation on my part.

------
crusso
I have to admit that I love stories like this as well as the Tesla refutation
of that NYT review.

I think my interest in the nature and impact of our reliance upon human
testaments first developed when I became engaged in theological discussions.

Here we are with all our instant access to information, our pictures, our
videos, our blogs from the man on the street, our DNA samples, etc., and we
can't figure out if one guy got legitimately stranded by his electric car or
if another guy created a new Operating System -- yet you can go to church on
Sunday and listen to lots of people who will swear all day long that a woman
was impregnated by the sole deity of the universe two thousand years ago. This
knowledge is based upon a translation of a story written many years after the
supposed event took place.

Bizarre.

------
Mahn
My impression from what I've read is that Jeff did work on a linux fork which
was known as Google OS internally (I think there were even public news about
google working informally on a "Google OS" in 2006-07), but that never really
catched on and was never turned into an actual product. Years later, the idea
of a web-first Chrome OS appears, and either a) someone reused Jeff's work to
build the core and nobody paid much attention to it or b) both things have
absolutely no connection and Jeff is mistaken in assuming his work was turned
into Chrome OS.

~~~
gojomo
If a single person at Google understood/reviewed the 'Google OS', and then
later also authorized/reviewed the 'Chrome OS', then the strong form of your
(b) option, "absolutely no connection", is impossible.

Even without explicit sharing of code/people/documents, the earlier project
would have served as an investigatory prototype and proof-of-concept, that
indirectly encouraged or dissuaded certain later directions. So these 'true
father' disputes get into shades of meaning and clashing-but-valid
perspectives pretty quick.

~~~
georgemcbay
At some point you need to draw a logical line, lest you arrive at Linus
Torvalds inventing ChromeOS since he wrote the kernel for it way back in the
early 1990s.

I have no knowledge of ChromeOS history other than what has been published
here, but from my reading of these things it does seem pretty disingenuous for
Jeff Nelson to claim to have 'invented the Chromebook'.

~~~
gojomo
The wording "invented the Chromebook" is aggressive, especially for
collaborative projects that collect many contributions and work on shared
themes. But, journalistic accounts and promotional bioblurbs typically dumb
things down, in exactly this way.

And, if at any point Google asserts that Nelson's '662 patent covers the
Chromebook/ChromeOS or similar products from other companies, then it's a
defensible statement, at the level of fuzzyness that's used in these contexts.
It should be interpreted as, "invented [key enabling technology for] the
Chromebook"... like when people talk about who "invented the iPod" or
"invented AdSense".

------
MatthewPhillips
Google+ doesn't have permalinks for comments, otherwise I would have linked to
Antoine Labour's comment towards the bottom. Says he is the most senior
engineer still working on Chrome OS and has never heard of Jeff Nelson.

------
lutusp
The title of this submission: "Chrome devs deny Jeff Nelson's role in the
creation of Chrome OS"

Quotes from the actual article:

"I'm somewhat skeptical of this."

"It would be nice if some Chrome OS folks more knowledgeable than I could shed
light on this, because I truly don't know."

Analysis: The linked article has one developer (not "Chrome devs") confessing
that he simply doesn't know what the facts are (not "den[ies] Jeff Nelson's
role in the creation of Chrome OS")

Conclusion: _Don't write your own submission headline, you will get it wrong._

~~~
spatulon
There are other Chrome developers commenting on the linked post, and they deny
Nelson's role.

~~~
smackfu
Yeah, I don't think that's very prudent of them. This happened seven years
ago, and as they say, many of the involved people left. What if one of them
did have a meeting with this guy?

~~~
DannyBee
Well, for starters, one of the guys who commented has been there since the
beginning. As for the rest, this is very unlikely. Think about this for a
second. They'd already started a project called ChromeOS, and they then decide
to have a meeting with this guy about the idea of a web browsing laptop (or
whatever)?

That doesn't make sense.

I have my own recollections of when/how the ChromeOS project started (since
they asked for legal and open source advice ), and it pretty much matches
other folks in that thread. I never heard from this guy, and I had heard from
now-executives (they were just regular folks back then :P) about the
idea/plan.

So, while theoretically possible still, it's pretty unlikely. I expect this is
simply a case where a guy thinks what he did got used elsewhere, and it
wasn't.

There were a lot of independently developed projects that did kinda-the-same
thing back in 2006-2007.

~~~
forwardslash
And yet his name is on the patent: [http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...](http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8,239,662.PN.&OS=PN/8,239,662&RS=PN/8,239,662)

~~~
justinschuh
The patent in question has nothing to do with Chrome OS, beyond the very
generic notion of thin clients.

~~~
DannyBee
What he said.

------
abcd_f
There's some sort of patent involved -
<http://www.google.com/patents/US8239662> \- "Network based operating system
across devices", filed in '09, issued in '12, assigned to Google.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Oh that is sweet! Google was finally waking up to the patent reality after
2007 and encouraging folks to file patents on their projects. (I've got one
filed for a laser pen pointer toting telepresence robot somewhere out there)
It looks like Jeff took his ideas and sent them into the patent guys who
dutifully filed them and voila, "invention" of ChromeOS without having written
a single line of code of it :-)

Reading through the claims it does look like ChromeOS uses those concepts so I
guess Jeff gets the last laugh after all.

~~~
jeff-nelson
I tend to agree that Google doesn't file enough patents.

For such an innovative company, with hundreds of different products in several
industries, and many of the best and brightest employees anywhere, their
patent portfolio is miserable.

Regarding, "It looks like Jeff took his ideas and sent them into the patent
guys who dutifully filed them and voila"

Well, for one, this wasn't just "ideas". I created an operating system and
used it myself for over a year, pitched it to management, sent it to a company
wide email list, and got head count assigned to the project.

Aside from that, Google has been very contemplative about what patents to file
or not file.

Without going into any great detail, I wrote 2 patents on my Google OS
operating system - and only the one was ever perfected.

I wrote 3 or 4 other patents on unrelated projects that were all filed as
provisional patents and allowed to expired.

At least 1 of the expired provisional patents was very, very commercially
valuable, in my opinion, but Google apparently did not recognize that.

------
Mahn
Here's his LinkedIn profile by the way:
<http://www.linkedin.com/in/nelsonjeffrey> It looks like he's pretty sure of
his connection with Chrome OS.

~~~
smackfu
I don't think most people can see anything there other than that he worked for
Google, since we're only 3rd degree connections.

~~~
Mahn
Right, here's the summary he has on his profile verbatim then:

"Mr. Nelson invented Google Chrome OS while working at Google in 2006. He has
19 years of experience in cloud computing and Big Data analytics. He has
written two books and many magazine articles on Java and cloud computing. He
has extensive experience in search, SEO, and eCommerce industries, building
highly scalable web services, and leading world class engineering teams at
such companies as Google and eBay. He holds a Masters Degree in Applied
Mathematics."

~~~
smackfu
Does it say when he left Google?

~~~
Mahn
According to his profile:

Member, Technical Staff Google, Inc. January 2006 – January 2008 (2 years 1
month)

~~~
DannyBee
MTS is the name that was given to folks who hadn't been slotted yet. So either
he got slotted and didn't like his title enough to list it, or he never got
slotted (which would be very odd for 2 years).

------
jeff-nelson
Hello all. I am the Jeff Nelson under discussion.

I am not surprised some people are calling this claim into doubt since its was
work done back in 2006 and 2007. It sounds like many of these questions are
being raised by people outside of Google or individuals who joined the project
after 2007.

First, let me reassure you that while I was not able to walk out of Google
with my email history or design documents, Google sent me long correspondence
about the Chrome OS patent after I left Google. I don't believe this
correspondence is covered by any NDA since it was sent to me after I left
Google, and I have retained all of that correspondence.

I published the work called "Google OS" on a company wide email list in April
2007, with subject line "Google OS", and received hundreds of positive
comments from other engineers at that time. I also held a tech talk on "Google
OS" in May 2007. Anyone at the company in April 2007 will likely retain a copy
of the original "Google OS" email, search for subject line "Google OS" in
April 2007.

The operating system that I invented, as described in the April 2007 email on
a company wide email list, was a webapp-centric chopped-down Linux with a
Chrome browser front-end. The operating system had almost no applications
installed on it, instead all of the functionality came from webapps;
performing any operation on the desktop launched a Chrome window to one of
many webapps. The original April 2007 version of the operating system that was
published on a company wide email list was substantially identical to the
publicly released Chromebook product, as was the writeup in the original 2007
email.

Further, back in 2007, I had meetings with Jeff Huber (VP of Google's consumer
products group), Larry Page (now CEO), several other directors and managers,
and even presented a techtalk - all of these meetings on Chrome OS project. By
the end of 2007, I was working with a product manager, and together we were
able to convince management to launch the Chrome OS project and assign head
count to the project by the end of 2007. In August 2007, my product manager
and I even met with an external hardware vendor to have exploratory talks
regarding their interest in distribution a Chrome OS laptop.

All of this is verifiable both from the email record, such as the April 2007
"Google OS" email to a company wide mailing list, and also by those who met
with me on Chrome OS in 2007, including Larry Page himself. Further, I retain
the hard copies of the correspondence with Google that was sent to me after I
left the company on the subject as well, which I don't believe is covered by
any sort of NDA.

I hope this clears up some of the controversy. Again, I am not surprised that
many of you who either worked on Chromebook or joined Google after 2007 have
never heard of me. Once I left Google, there would have been no reason to
continuously bring up my name as the original inventor, and I have chosen not
to come forward until the patent was finalized and published. I apologize to
those of you who may have been confused by this.

So to summarize: 1\. I wrote the original Chrome OS and published it on a
company wide email list in April 2007. 2\. I wrote the patent in 2007, which
is now accepted and published by the USPTO as of August 2012 and shows my name
as inventor. 3\. I convinced management to launch and assign head count to the
original Chrome OS project by the end of 2007.﻿

~~~
jrogers65
Would you mind posting (potentially redacted) copies of those emails, just so
that we can get an idea of what was involved in GoogleOS? It would be nice if
some of the people you worked with piped up to tell us more about this too. I
suppose that they will see what is happening and do so some time soon anyway
as this is getting quite a bit of exposure.

For everyone else, here's confirmation of the patent - Jeff's name is indeed
on it: [http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...](http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8,239,662.PN.&OS=PN/8,239,662&RS=PN/8,239,662)

> Inventors: Nelson; Jeffrey (Mountain View, CA)

This seems legitimate to me and, frankly, the responses from Peter Kasting and
other Google employees look to be immature and childish. Perhaps most Google
employees are not as professional and high caliber as they appear on the
surface.

~~~
magicalist
There were jokes made in that thread, but can you point to any of Peter
Kasting's actual comments that would qualify as immature and childish? I only
know Peter's work on chrome/webkit bug reports and occasional sites where
"pkasting" shows up (he has a single comment as an hn user), but I've only
known him to be communicative and supportive, and this is more than a small
overreaction to paint him like this when all his post amounts to is "this
doesn't sound right. anyone know more?" and his additional comments are
specific and not emotionally charged. Hopefully the irony in your post isn't
lost on you.

As for the patent, it doesn't seem all that chromeos specific, actually. For
instance, the claims are very focused on an OS that is or can be stored
server-side, with the client fetching an image from the server (that includes
the user's preferences?) on startup and dumping it again at shutdown. The
patent process tends to make ideas more generic as they are recorded, but even
a generous interpretation of this doesn't really cover chromeos or the OS he
described in the blog post (at least the part he most emphasized, the idea of
keeping everything in RAM). ChromeOS doesn't get OS updates that differently
than other operating systems (and certainly not as new images every time it
connects to the update server), and the preferences sync system stands totally
separate from the rest. This doesn't invalidate the blog post, but I don't
really think the patent backs up the specific claim of "inventing chromebook".

~~~
jrogers65
Yes, you're quite right about Kasting - it was late at night and my focus was
lacking. Unfortunately, I cannot correct my comment above.

------
olegp
Success has many fathers ... although I guess it remains to be seen how much
of a success Chrome OS turns out to be. I for one am rooting for it.

------
cmccabe
Now this is just ridiculous.

Everyone knows that Al Gore invented ChromeOS.

