Today, Tim Bray started working for Google, and had the search giant just put out a one-sentence press release stating this fact, the development would be worth reporting. But what makes this move especially noteworthy is that Bray announced it in a 1,260-word blog post mentioning an absolute hatred of the iPhone.
Bray is a rather important person in a lot of tech circles. Two interesting details regarding his accomplishments: he’s the co-inventor of XML, and spent several years serving on the W3C Technical Architecture Group.
Here’s what the respected developer had to say about the iPhone, though: "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."
In turn, Bray’s a huge fan of Google’s mobile operating system. He wrote, "The reason I’m here is mostly Android. Which seems to me about as unambiguously a good thing as the tangled wrinkly human texture of the Net can sustain just now."
So it looks like the Android-iPhone war is about to get a lot more fierce. Although for what it’s worth, Bray was careful to say that his opinions don’t necessarily reflect his new employer’s stance on anything.