Andy Rubin
It's an unusual way to boast, but Rubin is allowed some bombast. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this spring, the most important trade show worldwide for tablets and smartphones, 90 per cent of the devices unveiled ran Android. In August this year, tech analysis firm Canalys reported that 48 per cent of all smartphones sold in the second quarter of 2011 were Android devices. The nearest competitor was Apple, on 19 per cent. Android overtook Apple's iOS in 2010 -- according to Google, 500,000 Android devices are currently activated every day.
Rubin is tall -- skin and bones, really -- and looks younger than his 48 years, dressing casually even by Google standards. He grew up in Chappaqua, 60km from New York. His father gave up psychology to start a direct-marketing business selling electronic products. Soon, the Rubin home was full of technology. "After the products had been photographed for the catalogue, they ended up in my room," says Rubin. "I was always the first of my friends to have the coolest gadgets. That's where my passion was born."
Apart from a short time in Switzerland as a designer of optical systems at Carl Zeiss's labs, Rubin has spent his career in the US, working for three IT giants: Apple, Microsoft and now Google. In 1989, on holiday in the Cayman Islands, he was walking along the beach at dawn and saw a man sleeping out for the night. It was Bill Caswell, a senior engineer at Apple, fresh from a row with his girlfriend. Rubin gave him a bed; Caswell reciprocated by offering him a job just as the company was about to launch the Macintosh. During his time there, Rubin worked on Magic Cap, a light mobile operating system that simulated the interface of a computer desktop, but which never took off.
In 1995 he joined Microsoft and was nearly fired for fitting a mobile robot with a web-cam and microphone, and sending it roaming the offices. Microsoft saw it as a security breach; Rubin doesn't have many kind words for the Seattle-based
Rubin is tall -- skin and bones, really -- and looks younger than his 48 years, dressing casually even by Google standards. He grew up in Chappaqua, 60km from New York. His father gave up psychology to start a direct-marketing business selling electronic products. Soon, the Rubin home was full of technology. "After the products had been photographed for the catalogue, they ended up in my room," says Rubin. "I was always the first of my friends to have the coolest gadgets. That's where my passion was born."
Apart from a short time in Switzerland as a designer of optical systems at Carl Zeiss's labs, Rubin has spent his career in the US, working for three IT giants: Apple, Microsoft and now Google. In 1989, on holiday in the Cayman Islands, he was walking along the beach at dawn and saw a man sleeping out for the night. It was Bill Caswell, a senior engineer at Apple, fresh from a row with his girlfriend. Rubin gave him a bed; Caswell reciprocated by offering him a job just as the company was about to launch the Macintosh. During his time there, Rubin worked on Magic Cap, a light mobile operating system that simulated the interface of a computer desktop, but which never took off.
In 1995 he joined Microsoft and was nearly fired for fitting a mobile robot with a web-cam and microphone, and sending it roaming the offices. Microsoft saw it as a security breach; Rubin doesn't have many kind words for the Seattle-based