Patrick Gage Kelley

Today I announced that I am officially a candidate for the Graduate Student Association Presidency, at Carnegie Mellon. GSA does have a website which can be accessed here though it is presently down, which is fine since it is really bad (and thus one of the first things that needs to get fixed).

But then an announcement is nothing.

This week Google announced Android, “a Linux-based mobile software stack,” read: phone software that is open and anyone can build stuff for. Now if this is the GooglePhone that everyone has been hoping for to come dominate the cell phone market (and kill the iPhone) I think it is a failure, but if this is some long-term plan to make cellphones better devices for software developers maybe it will work.

Sure they have said they will have a development kit for programmers to hack at out within the week, but people say it is unlikely we will see any phones that will run this until late next year.

I think the most interesting thing we can learn from this is if a truly “open” platform can really take over a market. Everyone admits that cell phones suck, that is the reason the iPhone is doing well, the market was full of products so repulsively bad that anything looks comparitively amazing, but this is a real chance for open source to fight and secure a lot of ground (faster than in the OS world anyway).

And while some say that Google will teach Apple the lesson they should have learned from Microsoft about being too closed (aren’t they already opening up…) I am currently much more inclined to agree with those who think Google is suddenly in the vaporware business (even though i am not a powazek fan these days after the whole jpg thing). I am even about ready to think this is a giant mistake and the market doesn’t want tons of open software on their phone, “they want a phone that just works,” and Google and its 33 friends can go startup a poorly run deli

Maybe I have just been reading too much 37signals but it seems like this small team, get it done mentality is even more powerful than a giant company and likely more powerful than a completely collaborative environment. Or maybe I just refuse to admit that the author is dead.

In a month I will hopefully be at the helm of a reasonably large student populous (approximately 4500 graduate students) and there are a number of projects I would like to get done. Politics at this level is largely a mangement and organization task and I think it is important I have more actual progress than announcements. I am excited.