A meditation on Jobs' quote that design is an expression of the "fundamental soul" of a human creation. What is the fundamental soul of Google, and how should it be reflected in Android?

1. What Android Can Learn
from Steve Jobs
Tim O’Reilly
@timoreilly
October 10, 2011
#AndroidOpen

2. Design

3. Design?
Source: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/iphone-4-vs-androids-best-spec-face-off/

4. Early review of the Nexus Prime
“the UI is a lot more sophisticated and clean, making
even iOS look old and clunky”
http://www.examiner.com/computers-in-denver/samsung-nexus-prime-goes-for-a-video-tour-along-with-ice-cream-
sandwich#ixzz1aK1cmJvU

5. Sun Tzu: “Avoid Strength. Attack Weakness.”

6. Steve Jobs on Design
“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer.
It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains
and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from
the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental
soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing
itself in successive outer layers of the product or
service."
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/08/business/how-steve-jobs-infused-passion-into-a-commodity.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

7. What is the “fundamental soul” of Google?
“Access to all the world’s information”

8. “We founded Google to help connect people to the
information they need— and we have been
obsessively focused on that goal ever since.”
-Sergey Brin, 2010 Founders’ Letter

10. “Google Translate now works in 58 languages
including Hindi, Persian and Swahili, and can offer
translations between 3,306 language pairs. It’s still far
from perfect, but we've come a long, long way, thanks
to improved algorithms and scaled computing power.
For geographic information, we literally cover the
globe with imagery from satellites, airplanes, and
cars, and we've made street maps available of nearly
100 countries.”
-Sergey Brin, 2010 Founders’ Letter

11. 2005: Stanley Wins the DARPA Grand Challenge

12. 2011: The Google Autonomous Vehicle
“We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more
data.” - Peter Norvig, Chief Scientist, Google

13. A few key assertions
 We are building a network-mediated global mind
 It is not skynet
 It is us, augmented

14. Think about access to information, but also about
sensors, and how both work together to enhance
connection and collective intelligence.

15.  Sensors, local data, social connection
 Sensors, personal data, social connection
 Sensors, civic data, social connection

16. “The dark clouds currently looming over the world
economy are a hardship for us all, but by the time
today's children grow up, this recession will be a
footnote in history. Yet the technologies that we create
between now and then will define their way of life.”
- Sergey Brin, Google Founders’ Letter 2008

17. Work on stuff that matters!

18. Create value for others

19. Create value for others

20. Create value for others
4

21. Create Value for Others

22. “A panama hat maker in Bolivia is now selling in 84 markets and has grown to 50 employees
across Latin America using AdWords.
The owner of a baby products store in Nigeria had such a response to her AdWords campaign
that she literally ran out of stock.
A butcher in Warsaw using AdWords saw that at Easter, one of the busiest times of the year, the
queue of people who came to pick up their online orders was longer than the queue of those
shopping in the store.
Displaced by Hurricane Katrina, the founder of a fitness bootcamp was able to completely
rebuild, and then grow, his customer base with AdWords when he returned to New Orleans and
started over.
Using AdWords to find new customers in the wake of the recession, a son helped his father turn
around his ailing home security business, now the largest in El Paso.
The first Thai AdWords customer, a third-generation tailor, has grown his business from 5,000
customers in 2002 to over 400,000 internationally today.”
-Sergey Brin, 2010 Founders’ Letter

23. Creating Value for Others
Where is the equivalent storytelling for Android?

24. “You are what you pretend
to be, so be careful what
you pretend.”
-Kurt Vonnegut,
Mother Night

25. “Don’t be evil”

26. Control

27. Control?
“We have been working to try to apply some of the
open-access principles of the Internet to increase
user choice and innovation in the mobile space.”
-Larry Page, Google Founders’ Letter, 2007

28. Control?
“...building in Android offered more access to the core
functions of the phone, the ability to integrate with
more third-party APIs and good tools to build with. He
said he was also worried about Apple stifling the app
because it might be too close to the iOS native
functions. ”We want to be a one-stop shop for
contacts and interaction; that’s a big goal and we
need the openness of Android to undertake those
possibilities,” Lior said. “With Android, you get a lot
of access from Google and the opportunity to build
something big, not something skin deep.””
-Lior Romano, CEO and co-founder of Contapps
http://gigaom.com/2011/05/05/android-grows-as-primary-target-for-innovative-developers/

31. Three pillars of open
– Open source
– Open standards
– Community leadership

36. Be true to Google’s “fundamental soul”