Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Tim Bray Now Works for Google

Tim Bray declined Oracle's offer, in the wake of the Oracle-Sun acquisition, to remain an employee in the newly merged Sunacle/Orasun. And has joined instead what he calls the "No-Evil Zone," a.k.a. Google.

As he succinctly expresses it, on his blog dated Monday March 15th, published on his first day at work for Google: "The title is 'Developer Advocate'. The focus is Android. Fun is expected."

But there's also quite a detailed account of the prior background to this move...

The main showstopper to Bray's having moved to Google any sooner, apparently, was his reluctance to leave his native Canada for the Bay Area. Once it emerged that remaining in Vancouver was an option, that was the tipping point.

Another tipping point was apparently the nature of his interaction with his former new masters, Oracle, once Oracle had officially become the owners and operators of Sun:
"I’d had an offer to stay with Oracle which I decided to decline; I’ll maybe tell the story when I can think about it without getting that weird spiking-blood-pressure sensation in my eyeballs."

"The reason I’m here is mostly Android," he explains, adding that so far as he is concerned Android is "about as unambiguously a good thing as the tangled wrinkly human texture of the Net can sustain just now."

Google are getting one of the finest developer-thinkers anywhere in the World Wide Web - and incidentally one of the best writers anywhere on the Web too: not too many others would or could ever have coined a phrase like "the tangled wrinkly human texture of the Net" - marvelous stuff.

Google, cherish and enjoy Tim Bray, and give him leave to do his utmost. Tim, help make Google even Googlier!

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