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Joe's specialty is browser-based software. He did the iPhone client for Facebook. It's one of the largest installed-base products in the world. So Joe has the ability to think and do big stuff. That's why I want to work with him! Anyway, he thinks the iPhone is great. He doesn't want to use Android. But I want him to use it, for the same reason I use it. Which is the title of this piece. Right now it's the only open source mobile OS that has a chance against IOS. If there is no alternative to IOS then Apple will have exclusive control over what makes it to market. That is a future none of us should want to live in. The better IOS is relative to Android, the more you have to worry about. So when smart people like Joe, people who could make a difference by making software only for Android, and thereby give more people a reason to prefer it, don't get riled up and do exactly that -- you gotta wonder how we're going to get out of this mess. I don't like Google any more than I like Apple. But at least they don't control the channel of apps to users of Android. That's a huge deal. It makes up for a lot of Android's inadequacies. And if Google fucks us, let's find another home. The problem, as long as I've been in software, is the inability of individual creative people to work together in a way that preserves their independence. It's what gives Apple or Microsoft or Oracle, IBM, Netscape, Sun or whoever happens to own the pipe at any particular moment, the power to kill markets. It's what forces us to throw everything away every ten years and start over. It's why it feels like instead standing on the shoulders of giants, we're standing on their toes. I get angry at the selfishness. Joe has great capacity to create. We need that to be involved in keeping us free. It's not enough to dream about Nirvana, we have to create it too. |
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I had lunch last week with 
