CNET Interviews Andy Rubin – “It Will Change the Game”

There is an excellent interview with Andy Rubin up on CNET today.  If you’re new to Android or not following along too closely, he’s the guy responsible for Android.  Period.  He’s currently Google’s director of mobile platforms after having previously co-founded Danger (Sdidekick) and Android back when it was still considered a startup.

The interview is the most thorough we’ve seen with Rubin and plenty of excellent questions are asked.  We’ll save the meat and potatoes for the full piece, but here are a couple of quotes to get you hooked.

On Palm’s WebOS and iPhone: “You can have spurts of innovation. You can nail the enterprise, nail certain interface techniques, or you can nail the Web-in-the-handset business, but you can’t do everything. You’re always going to be in some niche.  What we’re talking about is getting out of a niche and giving people access to the Internet in the way they expect the Internet to be accessed. I don’t want to create some derivative of the Internet.”

On the difference between old school and new school OS: “Remember people used to trumpet “write once, run everywhere”? Well, I think we’re actually there. I think when we start talking about the possibility of exploring things like Netbooks and car navigation systems, you have potentially different processor architecture types. You have Intel, you have ARM, set-top boxes have MIPS.  We have all sorts of different processor architectures, and the guys who are steeped in legacy have trouble addressing those markets with a single solution. I actually think Android is the potential single solution that can address all those markets, and it’s new, it’s revolutionary. It will change the game.”

Why no Gphone?: “Yeah…I mean, it’s funny, if you build one phone…I’d much rather be the guy that does a platform that’s capable of running on multiple companies’ phones than just focusing on a single product.  A single product is going to have, eventually, limitations. Even if that was two products that’s going to have limitations. But if it’s a hundred products, now we’re getting somewhere, to the scale at which Google thinks people want to access information.”

You can read the rest of the interview over on CNET.  Hopefully some day we’ll be able to sit Andy down for a few minutes ourselves.