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And of course, it would be naive to discount the advantage Google has through the presence of one person and one person alone; Andy Hertzfeld. He's a big hitter
by RK 15y ago
And of course, it would be naive to discount the advantage Google has through the presence of one person and one person alone; Andy Hertzfeld. He's a big hitter... a really big hitter. To me, it feels like Yoda just turned up to show the young upstarts what it really means to be a Jedi.
Not to play the doubter, but I remember when Hertzfeld was slated to be the savior of Linux back in 2000/2001 (god I feel old!). His company, Eazel, did produce the file manager Nautilus, but then promptly went out of business.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/08/22/hertzfeld_spills_all_about_eazel/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/08/22/hertzfeld_spills_all...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel
- celoyd 15y agoPlenty of really good products come from companies that go out of business, and Nautilus was one of them. It drove the Linux desktop experience forward by about a decade – from Apple c. 1993 to Apple c. 2003, as flippant as that sounds. I switched to Linux on the desktop for a couple years largely on the strength of Nautilus. I eventually gave up and went to OS X (conveniently if accidentally using Linux to skip most of Apple’s rough OS transition period) when it became clear that, although there were some brilliant people on the Gnome team and elsewhere,* Nautilus and its approach was being left for dead. Instead, there were five years of stagnant file managers with pseudo-Aqua pinstripe themes. But Nautilus gets a lot of credit for trying. * For example, http://www.tigert.com/ http://www.tigert.com/ was a graphic artist who come up with some really elegant interface stuff.