Google's Newest Android Hire Slams Apple, iPhone
Just weeks after Apple CEO Steve Jobs reportedly slammed Google in an internal meeting, the search engine company's newest hire, XML co-creator Tim Bray, fired back Monday during his first day on the job as a "developer advocate" for Google's Android operating system.
In a post on his personal blog, Bray wrote that he'll "enjoy competing with Apple" and criticized the technology company's proprietary, closed platform for the iPhone that Bray says puts "strict limits" on the user experience.
"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," Bray wrote. "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."
Bray, who co-created XML during the late 1990s, continued with more iPhone bashing. "I hate it," he wrote. "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. The tragedy is that Apple builds some great open platforms; I've been a happy buyer of their computing systems for some years now and, despite my current irritation, will probably go on using them."
Bray went on to write that his job will be to promote and encourage Android development, especially in the face of the more restructure iPhone platform. Bray most recently served as director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems but resigned last month after Sun was acquired by Oracle. Now Bray will be devoting his time to talking with developers about Google's open source mobile platform and working on his own Android applications to get a better feel for the OS. And for the foreseeable future, he'll also continue to jab at Apple.
"Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other," Bray wrote. "I think they're wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it."
The grudge match between arguably the two most successful technology companies in the world right now began to heat up late last year when reports of Google's Nexus One smartphone began to surface; not only was Google offering a new OS to competing smartphone makers, but the search engine behemoth was now teaming up with HTC to make its own branded smartphone. Now the two companies are embroiled in not only a war of words but a major patent lawsuit; Apple accused HTC of copying iPhone technology for the Nexus One.