Tell them, my song.

James Gosling, the father of the Java programming language, joins Liquid Robotics in the role of Chief Software Architect. The company builds autonomous robots, called ‘wave gliders’, that can stay in the ocean for years and collect and transmit sensor data to the company’s cloud. As far as jobs and technologies in the IT industry go, it probably won’t get much cooler than this.

However, there’s one thing that I found amusingly interesting. When you look at some of the job openings for software developers at the company, you will find this line repeatedly: “A broad range of software development in C, C++ and C#.” No mention of Java anywhere, which could mean that the company does not even use Java in their products.

I find the thought entertaining that James Gosling, the father of Java, might soon be writing and debugging C# code, the language that is basically thought of as the Evil Empire’s Java-rip-off.

Anyway, I can fully understand why James Gosling preferred this job over anything that Google could offer him. Liquid Robotics appears to be an ultra-cool startup company, and what can be more fascinating in the IT industry than working on autonomous robots that cross oceans all by themselves?

Have fun, James!

Today’s news came a bit sooner than expected, but the day has come at last. Many people will now discover that they were not fans of Apple and its products, but that they were fans of Steve Jobs and his products. Steve Jobs has been synonymous with the rise and success of Apple and for most people he is Apple.

From here on, it can only go downwards. Nobody at Apple has his vision, drive and taste or the ability to sell this vision.

The staff at Apple can only try to institutionalize what Steve has created, but they won’t be able to build on it themselves.

We will still see nice designs in the future, but they won’t have much soul.

The beautiful, fascinating and exciting part of the journey is over. Just like IBM and Microsoft, Apple will fall back to insignificance now. Apple has become too big and too rich to simply disappear, but it soon will also be too institutionalized to create, innovate and move ahead.

The official resignation letter from Steve Jobs