Monday, October 16, 2006 at 11:32 AM
Posted by: Scott Knaster, Technical Writer, and Rose Yao, Mac Product ManagerScott says: The first time I used a Mac was back in 1983, a few months before the first one shipped, when I was working at Apple. In those days, most computers made you use a command line pretty much all the time. The Mac was very different: it collected together a whole bunch of revolutionary ideas, most importantly a mouse and a graphical user interface featuring point & click. Like so many others, I was blown away by that first Mac. I've spent almost all my career since then working on Mac stuff, and even during those few years when I was involved with an, er, other operating system (sorry about that), I still had a Mac close at hand.
So when I joined Google last year, and found out the company was starting up a dedicated Mac software team, I had plenty of friends and contacts to call upon and try to recruit. The word got around the Mac community, and an interesting thing happened: the Google Mac team became a nice mix of very experienced Mac folks together with people who are newer to the platform who are attracted by Mac OS X, its Unix base, and the fact that the Mac is more powerful, popular, and shiny than it's ever been. People like Rose...
Rose says: I'm part of the something new. When I was offered the opportunity to work with the Mac client team here, I hadn't used a Mac since high school and I wasn't sure what the big deal was. Although having a UNIX terminal at my fingertips sounded very tempting. I've been using a PC for years and it was just an OS to me: it's got its problems, but it gets the job done. After I met some of the engineers on the team, and watched a few of those really great Mac commercials, I started to become intrigued. But it wasn't until I got my shiny new MacBook Pro that I truly understood why the Mac inspires so much dedication among its users. Everything just worked and the brighter screen made my days in front of a computer a lot more fun. Not to mention the built-in camera, or showing my mom how I just recorded our piano and singing sessions on my new Mac.
So I've learned, and am still learning, a lot from my team about the platform, the design philsophy, and the needs of a Mac user. The greatest part of my job is to combine Google's mission with Apple's to build great products that bridge the gap between the web and the desktop. One of the reasons we started this blog was to give you guys, Google users, the inside scoop on the Mac team here and our products. Another reason was to ask for your feedback and suggestions -- so please use this Google Group to talk to us, and thanks.
