Google Goes Mobile
Miscellaneous, WSIL News & Views November 12th. 2007, 4:31pmLast week Google announced Android, an open source platform for mobile software development. Now google has released the software development kit. To top things off the Android Design Challenge is offering a total of $10 million in awards for good mobile software designs. Anybody feel like moving up a few layers and trying this out?
November 12th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
There is so much hype about everything Google that it’s hard for me to see what exactly they’re doing. I wonder how their employees feel about, effectively, outsourcing their software development for this, or if they’re eligible to participate in the challenge.
Things like this are why I’m not a fan of Apple anything; they will never let this software on their phones. Apple makes a good product and then gets upset if you try to modify it to your liking. Not very engineer-friendly.
November 13th, 2007 at 8:22 am
Steve, your Apple comment really only applies to the iPhone. In the past many people have complained that Apple didn’t make their computers upgradeable. I always thought they were doing us a favor…you’ll never have incompatibility issues with an Apple computer. Sure you’ll pay a price premium, but many people are willing to for a superior product. It’d be nice if Mac OS X was open source, but at least it has a Unix core so you can do a lot more software development than with Windows. When Apple signed this exclusive deal with AT&T, I was a bit upset. I don’t think Apple wants to continue down that path or many of their customers will be unhappy. It won’t take much for me to be exclusively a Linux user, and I think many Mac users are the same.
As for Google, I like everything this company has done so far. I’m pretty sure most of their employees are fat and happy. It sounds like a good plan to me. Why pay for a bunch of new employees to work on mobile software which has no defined direction when you can hold a contest and see what the tide brings in. Look at how much publicity they are getting.
November 16th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Bob,
I’m not saying it’s bad, just posing some hypothetical questions really.
And at this point, Google could pretty much do whatever they want and get publicity with it. When there’s so much hype around something (anything Google now), I just tend to dismiss it until someone shows me exactly why it’s great. Hype just turns me off. On that level, Google is akin to Harry Potter or Lindsay Lohan.
…unless they want to fund my PhD, in which case, I’ll put on my Google shirt and hat.