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Changing Climates for Microsoft and Google
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Dec 04, 2006 11:34 AM
from the a-path-to-the-future dept.
from the a-path-to-the-future dept.
ReadWriteWeb writes "Weather metaphors abound as this article looks at the evolving software environment — and in particular the competition between Microsoft and Google. Milan says that while Google enjoys relative dominance on the Web platform today, two fissures exist that will force them to move. The first is Microsoft's ability to use the exact same HTML based strategy as Google (like Microsoft's current Live initiative); and secondly Microsoft leapfrogging the current environment by solving rich application installation/un installation and enforcing an acceptable contract regarding what rich apps can do on a user's machine.
Unfortunately for Google, Microsoft is a lot closer to solving these two issues than people think. Microsoft has the best virtual machine with .NET, the best development tool with Visual Studio and the best access to developers with their MSDN programs. And they have a notion. Steve Ballmer himself has started touting the exact strategy they need — Click Once and Run."
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click once and be pwned (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just about the worst possible news. Microsoft's strategy of making it all-too-easy to install and run questionably-trustworthy code is why the email virus, web browser malware, and -- worst of all -- botnet problems have become the unsolveable epidemics that they are. Does anyone believe that Microsoft will actually get it right this time, in terms of introducing some practically workable mechanism for allowing only trustworthy code? (Not to mention the difficulty of meaningfully defining "trustworthy" in this context...)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
We're not talking about "will get it right
Do you in fact know anything about what you're
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In my experience
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That is correct: It would require the UnmanagedCodePermission, which code in the Internet or Local Internet zone does not have. You know, if you can think of a hole in 5 minutes, the
In my experience
Well, I prefer c# to Java, I found it to be an improved copy. But your mileage may vary.
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Re:click once and be pwned (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong. I said "Arbitrary files" not "any files". Go look up "isolated storage" - it allows a partially trusted app to read and write files, while ensuring that the only app that it is capable of messing with is itself. And what's so bad about remote servers? It works for gmail.
This is yet more argument from ignorance.
Additionally, single click 'installs' will eliminate the 'code running off the internet' problem.
Wrong. Such code runs with partial trust, in the internet zone.
Please, know what you're saying before replying.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe. But when you have an OS where major parts of the GUI subsystem run in ring 0 with many, many bugs in that subsystem, making installation of a trojan or a worm or other malware a simple
Visual Studio (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're a half decent programmer you'd be able to code just as well with a text editor as with an IDE. That fact that you imply you can't says more about you than the linux dev enviroment.
Again (Score:4, Insightful)
Again.. If linux had any dev environment that was ANYWHERE NEAR as good as VC++, maybe I wouldn't despise working on it.
Parent
VC: Great while it works... (Score:3, Informative)
While I generally agree that VC is one of the best development IDEs out there (and I have used several open source alternatives, namely for coding in different languages), it has some glaring bugs that make me want to rip my hair out.
VC 2003 had (and still has) an extremely annoying bug in its shortcut code whereby a compulsive ctrl-c and ctrl-v user like myself (in fact I've never quite determined which shortcut combination triggers it) can result in the end of a source file being duplicated twice. (So,
Re:Again (Score:5, Insightful)
Put it this way - if someone offered you a moderately featured family sedan for free, would you turn it down because you'd rather buy a formula 1 car that can go 80mph faster?
perhaps you need to go 200mph. most people dont.
its an even more tempting proposition when you factor in the the family sedan maker will automatically upgrade you car every year until eventually it does go as fast a formula 1 car.
Parent
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That being said I do my linux development under vi. But under windows I use VS. VS excels beyond any open-source replacement t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You refuse to use the best application out there for the task at hand, and then you complain that there isn't a good application out there?
What do potential employers think when they see "Intimidated by complex software" on your resume?
Re:Visual Studio (Score:4, Funny)
Perhaps, then, my penis would be of some assistance?
Parent
Click once and run? (Score:5, Funny)
click once and run, but run what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Different companies, with different products. (Score:3, Insightful)
MS provides tools for creating rich web apps. Sure, they produce some of their own apps (MSN Search, Live, etc...) to compete with Google. But their tool-set for the most part the best IDE in the industry. This allows any Joe-Schmoe coder to kick out rich web apps. They have an an amazingly robust VM in the
Click Once (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate Google Toolbar, Yahoo Toolbar and all the others not because those two are not useful, because they are, but rather because they condition the user to install EVERY FREAKING "IE Toolbar" out there. No Toolbars, period!
Your average user is a clueless idiot, and will click install all sorts of crap as long as he thinks it is okay. IT IS NOT OKAY! IE7 is the latest and greatest FOOBAR automatic install from Microsoft. Hey Microsoft, having IE7 automatically install with automatic updates is a really stupid idea, fire the asshat who signed off on that one. Not everyone is running PIV with a gig of ram necissary to run IE7.
So, as for the "click once and run" crap, keep it to yourselves!
Qualify Best (Score:5, Insightful)
Using persuasive language without a qualification comes accross as marketing FUD. Please qualify "best" for us.
So please qualify "best". Because its not reduced complexity, increased quality, best reliablity, best scalability, best security, shortest delivery time, easy integration, or fastest performance...
Re:Here's a test... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you mean the last of those options (IE building a custom app that stores customer data in a database) I might take an extra day to build a simple app in Java...
My app will run on windows, mac, linux, be web accessible (via standard browser or handheld), and will scale to millions of users by simply adding hardware.
Now try using Visual Studio to match that..
Sure anyone can open MS Access or Visual Studio and build a little database app for a 5 person company, but the data is now locked up in windows, building in web access is a pain, and you can't run anything but windows on your desktops.
Parent
Re:Here's a test... (Score:4, Interesting)
Many, but not all.
The company that I work for has some very important customers that don't, and I'd rather spend the time making sure that we worked without regard to operating system than being in the position of having to tell them that we're not interested enough in their business to make our site work for them.
Besides, who knows what the future will bring? Fifteen years ago, if someone told you that you should start developing for Microsoft NT/AS because Novell wouldn't be a factor in the NOS business, would you have believed them?
Parent
Doesn't Steve Mean.... (Score:5, Funny)
ClickOnce (Score:5, Insightful)
correction (Score:3)
Given, Microsoft has a lot of legacy technology and platforms that give them an edge moving forward. But you cannot ignore the other part of the momentum this technology carries with it. All the bugs, limiting architectures, and requirements for legacy support makes it harder to go into a new direction.
My prediction is that the more the environment changes, the bigger an advantage the newer players gain over the large, legacy companies that build their company on incremental products, like Microsoft does with Windows.
What MS Doesn't Have (Score:5, Interesting)
Google has GWT, which only about 100 people on Earth get right now. Google has an understanding for the Web, Web applications and how users should interact in the World Wide Web far surpassing MS's "reactive" method of toolkit design.
I see two companies. One which is using old methods, not innovating or developing new ideas and assuming stability in something as fast moving and cutting edge as the WWW. I see another company challenging old ideas (relatively old anyways) and proving the WWW is more than Web Pages and stateless client/server communication.
I see a company that think they get this but only see flashy UI's as the means to the end here. I see another company that understand the UI is just a view to this new idea that the Web is a series of intercommunicating applications users can access from anywhere.
But then, I don't expect many people, especially a monolith who's made their fortunes through brute strength rather than new ideas, to see this until it's apparently obvious. The search for the holy grail of the Web's next "killer app" is right in front of peoples faces.
difference between google and microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
on www.google.com search for 'microsoft':
Results 1 - 10 of about 393,000,000
on search.live.com search for 'google':
google page 1 of 751 results
I like my search results 'unbiased', so I choose google.
Re:difference between google and microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Google searching "microsoft": 39,500,000 results
Google searching "google": 52,800,000 results
MSN searching "microsoft": 80,139,835 results
MSN searching "google": 648 results
I can understand leaning a little more one way or the other, but 648 versus 52 million? Give me a friggin break.
Parent
relative dominance on the Web platform today? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Dominance" is easy as long as you don't intend to charge for it. If Google puts a price on Google's free-as-in-beer service offerings, alternatives will start to look more attractive.
(I don't run Google ad/spyware software (e.g., the Google toolbar) here because I don't like other people's software phoning home; I don't think the "advertising on everything" gambit will work on my dev tools either.)
The best development tool with Visual Studio (Score:5, Informative)
It may be better than Googles offering (nothing) but probably isn't better than eclipse/jbuilder.
And after using both Java and
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This is news to me, since I've been working off the same Visual Studio 2005 installation for almost 10 months now. Only time it got dreadfully slow was when I tried using a refactoring tool called Resharper [jetbrains.com]. Since I uninstalled that, VS has been zippy. Before switching to VS2005, I believe I had a VS2003 installation that was several years old.
Re:The best development tool with Visual Studio (Score:5, Interesting)
One of my favorite "features" was when I would tell Visual Studio to close and it would decide what I really meant was "update your intellisense then close". Great. With a project that size updating intellisense took about 2 minutes. I don't need intellisense updated right now, because I can't use it if you're closed. Just close.
The real clincher, though, was the "crash-on-debug" error that started plaguing the office. When you tell VS to "build and debug" it would build the program and then seg fault immediately. That's a serious pain with a large project because it takes a few minutes to load it again. To debug, you'd have to build the program then run it manually and then manually attach the process for debugging. This bug would strike staff at random, and the only solution was to do a complete rebuild of the entire project, non-distributed. This could take hours.
With the amount of talent in that office and the amount of frustration at that crash, we could have just fixed the bug ourselves and saved a lot of time if the product in question was open source, but it wasn't.
Visual Studio has cost that company a lot of money in wasted man hours.
Parent
The best Virtual Machine? (Score:4, Interesting)
If it's the best then why doesn't it work on a Mac or Linux?
logic errors abound (Score:5, Insightful)
1) The best virtual machine runs on my platform and preferably others.
2) The best development tool runs on my platform and allows me to write applications that run on my platform an preferably others. Visual Studio does not run on anything other than Windows and makes it difficult to write application that will run on any platform other than Windows. Therefore, Visual Studio could not be the best development tool.
3) The developers I look for write software for my platform and preferably others. The majority of developers available through MSDN are focused on developing Windows software using Windows development tools. Therefore, MSDN is not the best way to access developers.
HTML is not code (Score:5, Insightful)
Repeat after me:
HTML is not code.
HTML is not code.
HTML is not code.
What is not shown is the C++ compiler and linker that turns code into executable. Also not shown is the web browser which takes HTML and makes it presentable. And that's really the only difference between these two programs.
That and, I don't know, Turing completeness?
Upcoming patent cases: (Score:3, Funny)
Lindows vs. Microsoft for Click and Run operations
Pringles vs. Microsoft for Once You Pop, You Can't Stop operations
Denial....... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Denial....... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Strike Three - You're Out! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll concede on the third allegation which I interpreted as the denial of access to the source code. This is one of the reasons that I have Linux running on my home box since I like to know how things tick on the inside. But I develop with M$ at work and I wanted to point a few things:
Actually, I don't know if I could say that it is the best ever but it is a damn good virtual machine! It can run as well or even better of its equivalent JVM http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/compare/Benchmark_rJust b/c it's made by M$ doesn't mean that it is a horrible product. The company itself makes some really shady ethical decisions but there are a lot of developers working for M$ just like us who want to release a great product.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
To benchmark these is complicated as
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
MSDN is not just a nice collection of CD's - it's all available on-line [microsoft.com], and free as in beer. No ads, and it works well in Firefox! That's more than you can say for high-quality documentation for any other platform. I challenge you to prove me wrong.
I personally find the CD collection inferior
Re:and Google has ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The nice letter to the guy developing the google-map data interface was a great show. And no C&D, just asking nicely.
Im always amazed at companies acting ethically.
Parent
Re:and Google has ... (Score:5, Insightful)
People want their computers to run fast and easy. Aside from that, there are very few people that care how that is accomplished. So, if MSFT ensures that their computers are doing just that, they will have happier customers.
MSFT has been known to make sure that certain applications do not run w/o changes on their OS and if you think that they won't do anything in their power to shut Google out, you're sadly mistaken.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:google is (Score:4, Interesting)
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Reductionist (Score:5, Insightful)
An advertizing company with a search engine [and other tools] to drive traffic to its advertizements.
Google's goal is to make information available and useful to people. They do so through a variety of means, and currently their profit model is based on advertising. It's tempting to reduce companies down to soundbytes, but it's not really useful for understanding how they operate or what they'll do in the future.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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Not to disagree, but I never bought the "wardrobe malfunction" crap. That was done on purpose for some publicty-based reason. My take was that it wasn't the religious community that made a big deal about it, but the news media that didn't have anything better to harp on. Not that the religious community didn't object to it, but still, the media blew it way out of proportion and made it a scandal. Boring things don't make headlines.
What was the original
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I will give a fast list of companies. Some of them you may have heard of.
Apple
IBM (OS/2)
Novell (Netware)
Sun (Java, Solaris)
Lotus (Ever heard of Lotus 123?)
WordPerfect (I always thought that Microsoft DOS Word 3.0 was a brilliant WP. Very little interface. WordPerfect was clearly the big dog and it still has penetration in the legal field)
Netscape
It is true that many of these competitors we