Three “important” people are going to have to go to their local office supply store and pick up some new business cards. Tim Bray, co-creator of the XML specification, left Oracle to join Google. He’s going to be an Android Developer Advocate, otherwise known as a cheerleader. His frank and honest blog post about why he joined Google is sure to make Apple fanbois foam from the mouth:
The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. 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.
I hate it.
I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.
Then there’s Richard DeVaul, a wearable computer pioneer. He left his company AWare Technologie to join Apple, and his new title is “Senior Prototype Engineer”. He gets to play with shit that we can only dream about. His PhD, which he got at MIT, so you know this motherfucker is smart, was awarded for “memory glasses“, a type of display embedded in a pain of sun glasses that helps people remember to accomplish certain tasks. It’s said that he will be working directly under Jonathan Ive, Apple designer extraordinaire, in a secret lab focused on wearable computing technology. Only 7 people, except for Ive and Jobs, know what he is doing.
Last we have R.J. Pittman, who was the Director of Product Management at Google, but is now working for Apple. His new title, or what he is going to be working on, is unknown. Pittman only worked for Google for 3 years, and in a final email he sent out to his colleagues, he openly admitted his insane Apple fetish:
I was sprung from Google by a little company down the road that you might have heard of called Apple. Some might say I owe most of my career in technology to a little start up company that created the computer that I first learned to program, the Apple II, in 1980. By 1984, my life would be changed forever with the introduction of the most revolutionary creation of the decade, the Macintosh. A year later I would find myself spending more time with my first Mac than any other living being for my foreseeable teenage future. I’ve owned almost one of every Apple product released since then, and still own my first Mac that started it all some 25 years ago. In a strange but not so strange way, this is a sort of homecoming for me, despite never having worked for Apple.
I don’t know any of these people, and that’s why I put quotes around the word important in the first sentence of my article in case you were wondering, but I wish them all the best of luck in their new roles. Propel the industry forward, because we really do need more ads, more mobile phones, and more ways to entertain ourselves so we don’t have to stop and realize that in an age of ultimate freedom, and massive amounts of cheap, high quality consumer goods, we’re all glued to, and dependent on, flickering 3.5 inch pieces of glass.