Niniane Wang has left Google. The employee Google once used as a prime example of talent and aspirations is flying the coop. The smart young woman was the force behind Google Desktop as well as the world Lively, which was smothered in its crib at the tender age of four months.
Google said of Wang in 2006 :
Google is looking for engineers with great aspirations. Take Niniane Wang, for example. A co-inventor on 19 patents in various stages of filing, Niniane skipped three grades, learned the Lisp programming language at 10, and started college math classes at 11. At 18, Niniane graduated with a degree in computer science from Caltech (where she also designed a VLSI chip, built an audio recorder out of chips, and discovered she loved writing software).
We’re privileged to have Niniane at Google, but we need more engineers like her.
Niniane talks about her decision only briefly in her blog:
Recently I’ve been mulling over whether to blog more about software, since confidentiality is no longer as much of an issue. Many of you know this, but for those who don’t, I decided near the end of 2008 to move on from Google, after five amazing years. It was wonderful working on Desktop (stories) and Gmail and Lively (warm wishes to the hardcore users who worked around the clock to keep the product experience going with newlively.com), and now it is time to try new things. At the moment I am traveling and fiddling with a couple of web site ideas.
Lively is missed, but Niniane will probably be the greater loss for Google.
Tags: Google Desktop, Lively, Wang