James Gosling Leaves Google

scottbomb writes "Well, that didn't take long: 'After only a few months at Google, Java founder James Gosling has left the search engine giant to go to a small startup company specializing in ocean-based robotics.' In a brief blog post about his new company, Gosling says, 'They have a growing fleet of autonomous vehicles that roves the ocean collecting data from a variety of onboard sensors and uploading it to the cloud. The robots have a pile of satellite uplink/GSM/WiMax communication gear and redundant GPS units. They have a bunch of deployments. For example, one is a set of robots patrolling the ocean around the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico monitoring water chemistry. These craft harvest energy from the waves for propulsion and can stay at sea for a very long time. The longest that one craft has been out is 2.5(ish) years. They can cross oceans.... Slowly. They only move at 1-2 knots, which is a great speed for data collection.'"

Comments

Oracle?

[shutdown -p now]

Makes you wonder if the whole Oracle patent shitstorm around Java is making Google reconsider its reliance on that technology. If so, would be interesting to see what they bring forth instead.

Re:Oracle?

[lennier]

Dunno, maybe they'll switch to Forth as their language... That'd be pretty cool...

FORTH GO MULTIPLY AND

Re:Oracle?

[dudpixel]

Are you surprised?

Google is pretty poor at supporting anything longer than a week past the initial launch date.

The whole Google business model appears to go like this:
1. Invent cool tech
2. Make it into an awesome product. Functional, and working, but not finished.
3. Dump it on the public (as a "beta") with a half-hearted launch effort.
4. Start on next project.

For GMail - it worked, partially because a functional product is really all most of us want.

Search is one of the few projects they continually work on - because its what makes them money.

For many of their projects, including Google+, they fail because Google fails at marketing and seeing a project through. Have a look at how Apple launch a product, compared to Google. Apple are often still telling us how wonderful they are even years later, while Google seems to forget about its own achievements after a week.

I like Google - I use many of their services, and have and Android phone + tablet and develop Android apps...but its just plain disappointing to see how little effort is put into their products post-launch. I'm specifically talking about marketing effort, as I'm sure they are working hard behind the scenes.

... just like Java

[ccr]

The first thing that popped out as I glanced through the post was:

"They can cross oceans.... Slowly. They only move at 1-2 knots, which is a great speed for data collection."

And I thought to myself, "slowly? .. well, it's father of Java, after all."

What do you wanna bet...

[interval1066]

...that the REAL reason Gosling left was because the google execs were like "Ok Jimmy, here's your office, lets tuck you in... all nice and comfy? Good... now just rest here until we need you." I think the coolness of having the inventor of Java trolling 'round the office was greater than any expectation that he'd actually invent something for Google.

Re:What do you wanna bet...

[martin-boundary]

I doubt it. If you read Gosling interviews from the past few years, one of the ideas he likes to talk about a lot over and over is embedding millions of sensors into the world - in roads, walls, etc. Tiny little bugs that measure something, which can be combined into a completely novel picture of the world.

That's not really what Google does, they're an advertising company whose primary inputs are words and human behaviours.

The first is closer to hands on lab work, while the second is pure data munging, and my impression is Gosling's not that interested in the latter.

Re:What do you wanna bet...

[TubeSteak]

I was in Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD) a few months ago and sitting right behind me was a salesman from Liquid Robotics* giving his pitch to a potential client.

I'll admit, I listened in. The technology he was describing sounded amazing.
Alternative solutions are crazy expensive or have limited range/loitering/real-time capabilities,
while this thing can stay out more or less indefinitely if you pay for a big enough battery pack.

I recall something that a quick google search doesn't turn up in any articles:
The salesman mentioned that Liquid Robotics keeps their costs down by contracting fishing boats to drop off and pick up the Wave Gliders. Because, while you could wait for it to come home at 1.5 knots/hr, it's a lot faster (and not very expensive) to have it swim to/from a spot that someone was going to be at anyways.

By the time I had to leave, I was ready to buy one and I don't even need it.
I seriously feel that their technology is going to be the future of unattended oceanographic research
and if I had a million dollars to invest, I would.

*I never actually caught the name of the company, but from the /. summary, I immediately recognized the technology being described.

Re:SkyNet

[binarylarry]

PermGen is gone in newer versions of Java.