Vic Gundrota, Vice President of Engineering at Google, talks with Tim O'Reilly about the future of mobile computing.
They discuss several of Google's upcoming projects, as well as how application development is changing according to an increasingly mobile world.
Bio
Vic Gundotra
Vic Gundotra joined Google in 2007 as a Vice President of Engineering, responsible for developer evangelism and open source programs. He also oversees applications development.
Previously, Gundotra spent 15 years at Microsoft, where he worked on a variety of products and operating systems, including Windows 3.0, NT, Windows XP, and Vista. He was recognized by MIT as a Young Innovator under 35 for his work in sparking the Microsoft's change from Win32 to the .NET programming model.
Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O'Reilly Media also publishes online through the O'Reilly Network and hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and the Web 2.0 Conference.
O'Reilly's blog, the O'Reilly Radar, "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. O'Reilly is on the boards of MySQL, CollabNet, Safari Books Online, Wesabe, and ValuesOfN, and is a partner in O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
Wireless telephone that permits telecommunication within a defined area that may include hundreds of square miles, using radio waves in the 800900 megahertz (MHz) band. To implement a cell-phone system, a geographic area is broken into smaller areas, or cells, usually mapped as uniform hexagrams but in fact overlapping and irregularly shaped. Each cell is equipped with a low-powered radio transmitter and receiver that permit propagation of signals among cell-phone users.
Hearing the story about Tiger and the answer machine is one of the factors that has made me become more interested in the mobile market.
It makes me wonder what advances we'll see in the mobile space in the future, when those who have grown up with the technology take it to the next level and beyond.
If I had to choose, I would also choose to work at Google rather than Microsoft. Microsoft are slow to adopt new technologies, which explains why Apple is ahead of the pack. Most of the Microsoft programs have a pretty horrendous UI, which could easily be changed to make everyone's lives more pleasant. But they are stuck in their ways and so, we will not see any major changes anytime soon.
Google is a booming force that is only getting bigger and stronger. It's hard to imagine where they will be five/ten years from now. Microsoft, on the other hand, will probably not change much, which is sad.