He then went to Apple, where he worked on the consulting team that would go with every sale of its fabulously expensive WebObjects package, and then back to Subversion. (He wrote the book on it, at http://bit.ly/subversionbook.)
When Google bought out the company he was working at, he was reluctant to join: He’d set down roots in Chicago. But the company was happy to let him set up an engineering department in the city. He’s also in charge of Google Affiliate Networks, an acquisition from the takeover of DoubleClick.
“We believe in an open web for everyone ... The Web is fundamentally about openness,” he said.
But there are also two other ways in which it works to Google’s advantage. First, it encourages its developers not to fall behind rivals. If the price of being overtaken is that people will pick up their data and leave your application behind, you’ll have a stronger incentive to keep going.
But equally, for managers who don’t want to have to support a million wilting blooms, being able to export data means that unsuccessful projects can be shut down without regrets that users will curse the company for locking away their data on its servers forever.
Compare that with the outcry that Yahoo faced when it announced it would close Geocities: Efforts to save it sprouted up and Yahoo wasn’t popular. Google isn’t popular for closing services — but at least Google Notebook users can get their data out.
LOOKING FORWARD
So, export for blogs and Google docs is straightforward, as everyone is familiar with their formats. But how will exporting work for a completely novel idea, such as Wave, whose functionality nobody outside Google has yet managed to describe in fewer than a thousand words (it’s something like “e-mail and instant messaging and collaboration but with changes shown over time”)? How do you export something that has a unique format?
For a moment, Fitzpatrick looks faintly alarmed. But that’s not because he hasn’t considered it.
“We have talked about it. It’s not that difficult to represent [its data],” he said. “The question is how to represent time. Wave has the extra dimension of revisions. There are ways to represent that but nothing else really has anything that it’s like. It’s unique.”
What about Wikipedia’s “diff,” which shows the differences between revised versions of the same page?
“That’s perhaps the closest,” Fitzpatrick said.
The problem then is that a diff is a database representation and there isn’t an agreed way to export a database.
The irony is that if Fitzpatrick succeeds, then Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, will probably be happy.
“He keeps telling us, the way to not be evil is to not lock users in,” Fitzpatrick said. “He tells us, just get the users and we’ll figure out how to make money.”
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