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XML Co-Founder Joins Google, Blasts iPhone

Posted by kdawson on from the sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-apple dept.

XML co-founder Tim Bray has taken the job of 'Developer Advocate' at Google. Don't other companies call that position 'Evangelist?' Because he sure doesn't mince words against the iPhone in his first sermon: '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.

5 of 628 comments (clear)

  1. To be fair by JanneM · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is not a work-related "convenient opinion" of his. He's been critical of Apple's walled-garden approach to development for years, and an Android advocate since he got an Android phone in 2008 (see http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/12/18/Android-Diary for his chronicles using and programming it).

    --
    Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
    1. Re:To be fair by GlassHeart · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm not usually a defender of the "let the market sort everything out" mentality; but by the time the court ruled, Linux already had some pretty useable desktops, and OS X was not far behind.

      Microsoft was enough of a power to be able to dictate to OEMs that they may not pre-install Netscape, simply by threatening to charge different prices for Windows licenses. If that's not a monopoly, it's pretty damn close, because these OEMs did not tell Microsoft to fuck off. The fact is, they played ball and squished Netscape as instructed.

      MacOS X is irrelevant to the discussion, because it ran on PowerPC chips, because Apple wasn't willing to license it anyway, and also because the antitrust trial started in 1998 - some two years before the MacOS X Public Beta. As for Linux, GNOME's first major release was March 1999, entirely irrelevant to this discussion. KDE was first released in July of 1998, also irrelevant. So exactly which "pretty usable desktops" were you referring to?

      I remember joking at the time, "so an iMac's not a Personal Computer, eh?".

      The trial started in May 1998, while the iMac G3 that did not ship until August 1998. The iMac is also irrelevant to the Microsoft antitrust case.

  2. Re:The bird still sings in its gilded cage by schon · · Score: 5, Informative

    Another way to look at it is that iPhone provides a solid single platform that developers can concentrate on features rather than UI and input differences.

    Yes, because if Apple allowed pictures of women in bikinis, uncensored dictionaries or mentioning the name of a competitor on the iPhone, the "solid single platform" would fragment into a dozen incompatible versions, right?

  3. Re:Surprising? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm pretty sure you mean Nokia, not RIM.

    No, he said smartphones. A smartphone is defined as being a device with few enough sales that the iphone looks like a serious competitor in comparison. Nokia do not make smartphones.

  4. Re:XML vs iPhone by JackieBrown · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well that explains why proprietary alternatives to XML like JSON or YAML are so much better!

    JSON is not propietary.
    http://www.json.org/license.html

    Nor is YAML
    http://www.yaml.de/en/license/license-conditions.html

    Or is there a woosh here that I am missing?