Life Is Rich

Google has famously marketed a companywide philosophy of do no evil, even to the implied detriment of its profits. It seems that Google has had a change of heart, so to speak. Google posted a fairly lame attempt to refute this stark betrayal to it’s past “goodness”, but it’s almost laughable to anyone with an even basic understanding of the arguments over net neutrality. This is nothing but desperate PR cover.

The Verizon / Google “policy” is in pretty stark contrast to the commentary from Google just four years ago… it’s amazing how a company when under duress from market pressures (i.e. mobile market / Android vs. iPhone) can so easily discard the (likely faux) commitment to be good.

Oracle tonight just dropped a proverbial Daisy Cutter on the computing community. Everyone is abuzz on the impact to Android and Google – the direct targets of the Oracle lawsuit, but this whole action will likely have a chilling effect on the Java community (and conceivably MySQL as well).

First off, to get this out of the way, IANAL. That stated, Google’s creation of the Dalvik runtime for Android always reeked of underhandedness if not infringement. It was very clear that they didn’t want to be beholden to Sun and it’s licensing and restrictions surrounding J2ME / J2SE and Java, and attempted to skirt the letter of the law (or the contract / license to be more precise), by creating an alternate “universe” or run-time that just happened to be near perfectly compatible with the Java language and frameworks. Of course, Sun was a weak opponent at the time, and didn’t have the money or the muscle to take on an opponent like Google. I’m sure Sun’s pitiful state of affairs did not go unnoticed by Google in this decision. Who knew that Oracle would acquire the IP and technologies? So, do I think Oracle has the right to go after Google? Absolutely.

Unfortunately, for Java proponents, there is a much greater concern here. I’ve been somewhat critical of Java in the past. I feel entitled – I worked in the language full-time for nearly seven years (Java in my mind is fast on its way to becoming the next Cobol, but that’s really irrelevant to the purposes of this post!) Sun always maintained Java as the benevolent Dictator – or your idiot Uncle who always wore a leisure suit at family reunions – depending on your perspective. Numerous efforts were made to share control and input, but let there be no doubt – Java was under Sun’s control.

As Sun became weaker and more senile with age, it’s governance of Java also became even more incoherent. To be honest, while Java’s founders and a number of brilliant engineers at Sun managed to build a wonderful language, the strategic and business management of Java from the very beginning was a disaster. It never seemed that Sun ever knew what to do with Java, first pushing it on the client-side, then finding at least a justifiable position on the server-side. Of course, even then, it never provided Sun with a significant competitive advantage over the influx of commodity server vendors and seemed to be more of a distraction than anything else. If not for a number of “angels” – IBM, Oracle, BEA, and the fear of the common “enemy” in Microsoft, Java would have likely fallen into irrelevance long before it reached the ubiquity found today (noticed, it dropped from the #1 spot for the first time in 5 years last month). Interestingly, Oracle, and especially IBM, did know how to leverage Java within their organizations for competitive advantage.

When Oracle acquired Sun, the first thought running through my head is the literal fear that must be running through the minds of those saddled to Java – particularly IBM. While Sun was either a benevolent dictator – or incompetent stooge, they at least maintained a benign, if almost altruistic attitude towards Java. Sun was safe. The past has proven, Oracle is anything but benevolent — ruthless and cutthroat (and very successful) are more appropriate adjectives. Since the acquisition, the Java stalwarts at Sun including the primary inventor himself, James Gosling, have quickly exited the doors of the tall oval buildings in Redwood City (UPDATE: check out James Gosling latest blog entry). Outside of these unnerving departures, Oracle remained relatively mum on their stewardship of the language.

While this lawsuit seems perfectly justifiable, I think it’s definitely clear that this steward has teeth and will treat the technology much more as an asset to be protected and to be profited from than a philanthropic duty to the computing community. Oracle isn’t Sun. They aren’t going to sit idly by while a technology they own profits others with no consequent benefit to themselves. These are interesting days indeed, not only for Google, but IBM and a huge outsourcing community who built their organizations around Java.

No matter, with Microsoft relegated to lame duck, it’s exciting to see someone other than Apple and Google in the technology news these days!

UPDATE: This whole mess made me recall an excellent blog article I read on this very subject almost three years ago; seems almost prophetic now.

Faux pas extraordinaire from Google CEO Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

Not that I’ve trusted Google and it’s supposed “Don’t Be Evil” policy (see my numerous previous blog entries), but this comment is really short-sighted. Unfortunately, most people are blissfully unaware that they are entrusting so much information and power to a single company.

This is awesome…and creepily somewhat true.

UPDATE: More fun parody and comedy at Google’s expense from Fake Steve Jobs, some not so fun poking at the frightening behemoth that Google has become and its invasive nature (which I’ve belabored before – see Buy a Good Tinfoil Hat, Tinfoil Redux and Dark Clouds), and some pissed off Linux people.

If Android wasn’t enough, now we have Google Chrome OS. Welcome to the wonderfully bland, drab and unpleasant world of ubiquitous web applications. You can pry my native applications and my OS tailored for user experience (not one tailored to said companies cloud services) from my cold, dead fingers. Funny, one of my longest posts, and likely much better written than this sleep-deprived rant, follows a similar vein – when Steve Jobs told us that developers could do great things with the iPhone – you don’t even need an SDK, just use the web! It took less than a year for those words to be eaten. How many native applications are now available on the iPhone? (More than 50,000)

On a side note, I’m sure Chrome will run well on those netbooks that everyone is returning after realizing that they are nothing more than really bad web browsing calculators (and yes, I have used one). It has all the limitations of my iPhone AND my laptop with the benefits of neither. It’s the worst of both worlds.

For some reason, this news just really bums me out. Web apps are the dregs of computing. The lowest common denominator. We should be moving in a different direction. Using the web as the distributor of information head-ended by native applications that can take full advantage of the hardware and resources available to the end-user – i.e. web services. The answer is not to try to cram more crap through a browser (i.e. HTML5, Silverlight, Flash, Java applets, etc).

This is why I use a Mac. User experience. Thoughtful design. Great applications – both those provided by Apple with iLife and the OS as well as those from third-party developers who care about the user experience and quality. No matter how much functionality you add, you can only do so much with a browser. Not to mention, you have to fight long and hard as a developer to attain every inch. I did web apps for over five years – it sucks. You work your butt off to build an application that can never attain the level of quality, fit, and finish that is the goal of every good developer. It’s depressing. Your handicapped from the get-go.

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you will see every problem as a nail.” Abraham Maslow

Not to knock some incredible work that people have done on the web (I mean, look at the .me Mail app – it’s amazing, but I wouldn’t in a million years choose it over its native counterpart). But no matter what examples you may have of amazing web sites, it’s not the norm, nor is it easy to accomplish. The browser wasn’t meant for this. We’ve bastardized it as the platform for all app delivery (or at least Google has). Please, let the insanity stop! This is not the world I want to live (develop) in!

Maybe computing is now like Wal-Mart or mass-produced plasticky crap that always breaks after two weeks. Lowest common denominator, cheap, thoughtless. Native applications, innovation and thoughtful design are relegated to the antique dealers and the rare specialty shops of craftsman made products – sequestered to the incredibly small minority of people who seem to care or haven’t been brainwashed in expecting so much less from their computing experience.

UPDATE: Someone in the mainstream press apparently agrees. I had over 200 visitors to this site in an hour after a link to this page found it’s way to the linkback section of the original Google Blog article. Interestingly, I had no comments. Either my post really really sucked, or everyone generally agreed and didn’t have anything to comment about. Probably a little of both.

Another in a series of serious warning flags about cloud computing… Centralized authority, centralized power, centralized control, centralized data, centralized risk… BAD. BAD. BAD. How many times can the industry keep returning to the burned out husk of central vs distributed computing. Seems we’re constantly being herded back to the mainframe.

UPDATE: More #googlefail articles: PC/Mac World and this amazing graph of the “Great Googelapse”.