Android’s Hugo Barra Departs Google for China’s Xiaomi

"Brin and Wojcicki, both 40 years old, had been married for six years and have two children. They are not yet legally separated.

The possibility of a reconciliation of the pair is unclear, since Brin has become romantically involved with a Google employee, according to sources. This is further complicated by the fact that that employee had also at one point been involved with another Googler."[1]

[1] http://allthingsd.com/20130828/google-co-founder-sergey-brin...

I don't know if leaving google is news anymore. The average google employee only stays just over a year before moving on to something else.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-29/why-are-google-empl...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/24/least-loyal-employe...

In general product management does what you might think of "brand management" and "design language" so if Android needed roundier iconography I expect Barra was the guy to sign off on that, or if Samsung was getting too aggressive in making it a "Galaxy" phone instead of an "Android" phone he might get involved in that. I don't have inside knowledge, its just the kinds of things that role does in tech companies. That is why I wouldn't expect to see any sort of explicit impact statements wrt to Android. Rubin leaving on the other hand suggested that Android was going to become less the lede and more the flavor. Google has spent a lot of effort on making "Chrome" a more inclusive brand than Android which I find fascinating from a strategy perspective.

Here is the original Xiaomi phone

http://imgur.com/a/nWsOW

It's iPhone copycat because obviously it has Round CornersⒸ.

There are tons of MIUI roms out there available for download, try it yourself and see if you can find iOS there.

Yet not even about Android or the mobile market in general, a comment about the feeling of OSS community gets voted to top...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/business/global/in-china-a... .

That's NOT what the linked article says at all. It says the the founder, Lei Jun, is is positioning himself and his company as figurative heirs of Mr. Jobs by carefully cultivating a Jobsian image here, right down to his jeans and dark shirts.

It does say He is also selling millions of mobile phones that look a lot like iPhones, but they only look like iPhones in the sense they have rounded corners. If you look at a pic of a phone (eg http://p.www.xiaomi.com/zt/130718/images/m2s_26.jpg?130809) you'll see they are a lot less similar than many phones sold today - specifically the two-color shell makes it immediately obvious they aren't a complete iPhone clone.

So you did want to get all anti-chinese here. Your statement would have been just as valid without the 'chinese' qualification.

GPL license simply does NOT work in China for two reasons. 1)IP protection is sadly ineffective due to the impaired legal system. In practice, GPL=Appache in China. 2) Consumers hate to pay for pure services without goods delivered due to misconceptions from long lasting low cost of human labor. In practice, free full version software plus charging for premium human support does not work.

These two things are changing slowly but any one interested in China market should never ignore them, especially the 2nd one. Xiaomi will be sued outside China if they violate the GPL license. That's a risk they can't ignore.

About Link #2: For a lot of overseas Chinese like me, NYTimes is notorious for holding biased views towards China. This actually undermines its credibility compared with less biased media like BBC.

I bought a Xiaomi phone for my father recently and I've been Samsung and Apple client for a long time.

IMO, Xiaomi has done a very impressive job to improve Android OS for non-geek people. One of those nice built-in features is seamless fine grain privacy/access control of each app. Another is built-in 3G traffic optimization and metering which is important because 3G data plans provide smaller quotas in China.

Xiaomi brings a lot of merits from IOS to Android not by simply copying designs. They did a good job to solve the pain points for their audiences, who are mostly first time smartphone users. They mainly compete with feature phone vendors other than Samsung or Apple before Xiaomi gains huge traction.

My father was very glad to switch to Xiaomi after my several failed attempts of replacing his beloved feature phone :)

Even I myself plan to buy a Xiaomi to replace my buggy Samsung S3 (never-rooted, less than 1 year) if it's going to release a high-end model.

What you heard is all true, and those are actually not really conflicting point of views. The situation in China is very unique and cannot be fully explained without going on and on about the culture and its current political/economical climate.

A few points to note though: Tech people there are smart, educated, and very, very hard working. However the number one thing they all value is "efficiency", or rather: "the efficiency of getting things done". I've talked to people from Tencent, and one guy laughed at American companies approach of writing good, scalable, maintainable but very often over-engineered code. Over at Tencent they very often do whatever it takes to be first to market, and if needed to be, refactor everything 6 months down the road, and rinse wash repeat. It's the only approach that works for them in a hugely competitive market (also the largest one in the world). Company management wouldn't tolerate coding practices that very often serves no purpose other than to stroke the ego of senior software architects.

One may argue the merits of that approach, but if you look at how well services like Weibo, QQ, and Taobao scale (I think Taobao handled the largest E-commerce single-day-ordering in the world last year without having any major problems), it obviously works just as well as the western approach.

So an extension to this mentality is that whatever method it takes to get things done is the best and most celebrated method. Even if it includes brutal copying of a competitor's business model, or bribery of a government official, or direct corporate espionage being employed. The Art of War never mentioned any code of business conduct.

I have a hypothesis that a hardworking American engineering with a super-competitive dog-eats-dog Wall Street mentality may do very well in China, or even enjoy it, but I would never go there with any sort of idealistic vision of an "utopia".

Things happen there happen very fast, and a lot of money flows around very quickly, countless opportunities come and go on a daily basis. It's an amazing place that can make and crush people in the blink of an eye, so in the end, it's really up to what kind of person you are and what kind of lifestyle you want to pursue.

Hope my limited English skills delivered a more macro perspective for you.

The big problem with chinese entrepreneurs is that they dont understand or like they idea or serial entrepreneurship. To sell or merge with another company is considered for your company to have failed not a successful exit. They dont care about having lots of money but having the power of being the CEO of a major corporation that is listed on some stock exchange, they will do anything to get listed even if they dont need the money and know that the stock will tank as soon as the IPO opens. What ends up happening is there are tons of great small tech companies but no giants because the small companies refuse to merge together to compete with giants like google and microsoft. Only giants like tencent and baidu who have become chinese giants on their own can compete globally. This is the big reason why there are few hardware giants coming out of china, there are tons of small hardware companies like xiaomi that refuse to sell their patents and IP and eventually die taking their tech with them. Xiaomi is extremely popular in china and their phones are quite good for the price, they are serious competition for google, samsung and apple in china.

The thing is that the startup situation here (at least in Shanghai) is actually really good. College students are encouraged to go for their own companies. There're many policies to give benefit for this, like cheap office rent, lower tax rate and many thing else. Investment are relatively easy to get, according to my knowledge. The startup scene (can't find a word to describe this) is also very active. People have these and that kinds of meetups. Many chances of exposure are also available and really accessible, like "Starup Competition" (basically people go there and introduce their products and then most people get a medal), magazine/video exposures are also there. Personally I think it is quite good. The focus starts to move to mobile gaming and mobile apps and such.

I just want to say that the environment is quite good. It's not what most people imaging that government and large companies come and harass you everyday. It's just a successful startup is equally hard, as anywhere in the world.

From what I hear, starting a company takes about 6 months of pain, but once that's over and you are capitalized with 100k RMB, you get a pretty guaranteed Z visa, so once you get started, it goes fairly smoothly.

However, my personal feeling is that there are two kinds of opportunity in China. The first is the expat market, also companies wanting to expand to China. This is large enough to be comfortable (at least in Beijing). The second is the larger Chinese market, which is where everyone starts seeing money trees. My opinion is that the "opportunity" in the Chinese market only exists for those who are functionally fluent in Chinese, have a solid grasp of the culture, why people do the things they do, what motivates them. This would mostly be local Chinese, or American-born Chinese (or equivalent) with parents from China or Taiwan. A white expat has a nice market in other expats, but Chinese values and habits and their expression is very different from what white expats' default thinking is.

And then, of course, there's the issue that if you upset any apple carts with "disruptive" startups, the owners of the apple carts might exercise some of their guanxi, which means you'd better have some stronger guanxi. You can imagine how good the guanxi-fu of foreigners is.

Plus, gossip sells.

But if he left because of an uncomfortable personal situation, then that is highly relevant to onlookers, because it removes unwarranted questions about the state of Android at Google.

Who knows why he chose to come here? This is quite a personal decision.

It seems that is their plan. Release a phone that doesn't gouge the customer on price, then lower the price a few months before the next release.

Nexus 4 is built by LG, and a $249 price looks plausible without losing money. If you can identify one phone that did the most to push carriers to providing reasonably priced month-to-month plans with no overages it would be Nexus 4.

There is plenty to criticize about Android branding, OEM relations, and the Nexus program trying to take on too many issues at once, etc. But the products themselves don't seem to be the problem.

Yeah... no.