
 Now A No-Evil Zone - wglb
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/03/15/Joining-Google
======
cschneid
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.

~~~
jherdman
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.

~~~
cschneid
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.

~~~
jherdman
I think it's important that we draw a clear point about what you're talking
about when you say "open". I must confess that I thought you were talking
about open as in F/OSS. You're clearly talking about "Maury Povitch" open
("You don't know me! I'll do what I want!"). My guess is that you're pro the
former, if even you have not stated it yet. I think it's pretty obvious to all
involved that phones be moron proof by default. Phones after all, for the vast
majority of the populace, are simply an appliance (off-on, simple
functionality).

This view of the phone as an appliance is not accurate any more. Whether or
not the public realizes it, they're holding a computing device. In 5 years
time, I expect one to be able to use their phone with an external monitor and
keyboard and use it much like you would a Netbook today.

So where does that leave us? We're headed towards a highly portable and
compact computing device, that is currently a transitory species (if you
will). I think this is an exciting time for computing. This is a bold
challenge! How do you provide something that is safe by default, simple to
use, and doesn't encumber the tinkerers that have been proven to time and
again generate wonderful arenas of opportunity, wealth and societal change?

Personally, I think a sort of middle solution is best. An opt-in for
tinkering, perhaps. I think closing tinkering is just plain foolish. It's
proven to be valuable and shouldn't be stopped.

~~~
cschneid
I agree with most everything you say (open source is awesome, phones == next
gen computers, and opt-in tinkering would be cool).

But that last point is what I'm worried about. Windows is opt-in now sorta,
but it still gets malware. The Android appstore has already let financial
related trojans into it.

So figuring out the balance is hard if you account for people willing to click
"yes" to anything. I do in fact like the idea of an open system, but I want
people to explain why I should also be required to be as defensive about my
phone as I am with my Windows computer. (viruses, latest updates, dangerous
applications).

Honestly, I'm not arguing that walled gardens are the best thing ever, I'm
arguing that there are advantages that get ignored in the "OMG, it's my
device" arguments. I want a nice middleground, and not another device that's
totally open, and total a pain in the ass to manage and defend.

------
ilamont
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?

~~~
mseebach
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.

~~~
jokermatt999
Wasn't that supposed to be Google Voice?

~~~
glhaynes
Indeed.

It's hard for me to imagine the "killer app" that can't be done on a platform
that has a completely open web browser and a locked-down app store. Google
Voice seems as close to one as I can think of and note the following things
about it:

a) not THAT many people cared. You may think they did if you are a geek/work
with geeks, as I am/do, but your perception in that case is _way_ off

b) Apple's restrictions were circumvented via a web app

c) if such an app became important to have to enough people that it caused
concern to Apple, they can easily change their policy at any time to allow it.

I mean, there are a couple of things I'd really like to do on my iPhone OS
devices (ScummVM on iPad would be awesome... yeah, I know I could
theoretically jailbreak) but these are really minor annoyances compared to
what I get out of the platform. It's just a pragmatic choice for me, not a
holy war. And I can quit anytime. Really -- my cost of switching away from
iPhone is the cost of replacing like 5 or 6 $2.99 apps.

Jiggly boobs apps may be popular (within a fairly narrow niche), but hardly
anybody is going to switch devices over that. It's something people download
on a whim and play with for a couple of minutes then never open again. Welcome
to the $0.99 software market. It's not good or bad, it just is.

I guess what I'm saying is just this: all the cries of "software freedom!!" as
though it were a revolutionary political struggle ring hollow to me. This
isn't Stalinist Russia that people are being saved from if they're convinced
into buying an Android device instead of an iPhone OS device. There's
literally ZERO chance that Apple is going to completely own the smartphone and
tablet computing worlds. The great concern with Windows throughout the
nineties was that their lone real competitor was going to go out of business
and they'd essentially be all that's left and all devices would only be able
to connect to them and, with the advent of the internet, they'd entirely
control the publishing platform of the 21st century. None of that applies at
all to this circumstance. We've won: the web is open. Now it's down to games
and jiggly boobs.

So all the non-browser apps will always have plenty of places to be built.
Innovation isn't going to ground to a halt. You're just as free to buy a non-
Apple device as you ever were and you'll still be able to get to all of the
same web services as you do on an Apple device. All your documents and file
formats are still open no matter which route you go. All the options are good.
So if this topic matters a lot to you, buy non-Apple. But all this talk about
them being "evil" seems ... startlingly lacking in perspective.

~~~
jonknee
There are plenty. Tethering is a good one, right now you're at you're
carrier's mercy. Apps like Pandora that let you stream in the background, when
my friend found out she could have Pandora in the car she was amazed. Instant
messaging.

Homescreen/lockedscreen status apps--it drives me insane that the lock screen
on the iPhone is nearly useless. I can at most see the time and read the
latest text message. What about the number of emails, the current temperature,
word of the day, etc. My dad travels a lot, he'd love an app that simply
displayed what city he was in on the home screen.

~~~
tptacek
I'm trying to imagine why Apple would give a shit about tethering. It's
allowed in many (most?) of the venues the iPhone is sold in. If Android had
the kind of market penetration the iPhone did, AT&T would be pissing off
Google instead of Apple. This isn't a good example of Apple's "sharp toothed
lawyers".

~~~
jonknee
Well they won't approve apps that provide tethering so they apparently do give
a shit. The point with Android is you can install anything you want, not being
in the marketplace is as bad as Google can hit you back and that just means
users have to install it themselves.

------
newsit
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.

~~~
dalore
Try open one of them flash based porn sites.

~~~
somebear
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.

~~~
p6
Im sure you dont _wink_

------
ananthrk
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
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.

------
acangiano
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, ..."

------
rimantas
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
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.

~~~
jokermatt999
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.

------
wglb
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.

------
dbz
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
I think Bray is mostly an evangelist at this point.

~~~
Kilimanjaro
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.

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

~~~
robin_reala
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…

~~~
ubernostrum
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?).

~~~
ubernostrum
OK, so I'll break the rules and go all meta...

The one-line summary which started this little sub-thread was accurate and
contained basically all the salient details. Most of the rest of the linked
blog post is Tim explaining why he thinks Android's better than iPhone (and/or
why he thinks Google is better than Apple). None of that material is new or
noteworthy, none of it is new coming from Tim (he's expressed opinions on the
subject before) and none of it will be unfamiliar to anyone who frequents
_any_ geek-oriented forum.

As I write this there are 48 comments in the thread here on HN. 40 of those 48
comments are the same Android vs. iPhone arguments everyone here has seen more
times than they can count. Of the other 8, 3 are related to the process of how
Tim got his new job. So that's a whopping 45 out of 48 comments which have
nothing whatsoever to do with the actual bit of news announced in the linked
article.

Which raises a couple questions:

* Is that really what you want from HN?

* Is a one-line summary of the article, minus the flamewar fuel, more or less useful than the actual article?

* Gee, Brain, what are we doing to do tonight? _(Answer: The same thing we do every night, Pinky: argue about Android versus iPhone!_ )

(and for completeness' sake, yes, I flagged this link)

