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Microsoft and Google Duke It Out For the Future
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Dec 16, 2007 04:47 PM
from the send-in-the-clouds dept.
from the send-in-the-clouds dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "There is a long article in the NYTimes, well worth reading, about the future of applications and where they will reside — on the Web or on the desktop. Google President Eric Schmidt thinks that 90 percent of computing will eventually reside in the Web-based 'cloud.' Microsoft faces a business quandary as it tries to link the Web to its existing desktop business — 'software plus Internet services,' in its formulation. 'Microsoft will embrace the Web while striving to maintain the revenue and profits from its desktop software businesses, the corporate gold mine, a smart strategy for now that may not be sustainable,' according to the article. Google faces competition from Microsoft and from other Web-based productivity software being offered by startups, and it is 'unclear at this point whether Google will be able to capitalize on the trends that it's accelerating.' David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School, says the Google model is to try to change all the rules. If Google succeeds, 'a lot of the value that Microsoft provides today is potentially obsolete.' Microsoft used to call this 'cutting off their air supply."
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Why choose? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't trust Microsoft running software on my computer and to be honest, after what happened with China, I don't trust Google to store my information online. This isn't tin-foil hat paranoia, I am simply very aware that data is vital to modern free speech (given the advances made in propaganda by those that would deny us the ability to voice our opinions), and its only going to get moreso as time goes on.
Re:Why choose? (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, with a perfectly good, free, open source alternative (i.e. OpenOffice) why should anyone put their data at risk by using some web based application? I'd rather have the software local so I can do the work online or not.
I think the web-based model falls flat as soon as people actually look at what is available for free.
Parent
Re:Why choose? (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. I didn't want to be seen doing an overt plug, but OpenOffice is what I use to avoid placing my trust in either closed-source or an evil document overlord. The good news on this front, is that frankly Google Docs sucks balls as an office package, and the new MS Office interface has alienated a lot of long time users. Its a good time for the free alternative to shine.
Parent
Re:Why choose? (Score:4, Insightful)
Any time is a good time for a free alternative to shine, but OpenOffice more than ever has something very difficult to compete with. I think the best you can hope for is that OpenOffice was in part a cause of MS putting everything into Office 2007.
Things aren't going to get easier for OpenOffice either, as MS replaces VBA with
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
From my experience, the only people who did prefer Office 2007 were the kind of people that barely knew enough about Office to get their job done. Those people only cared because the ribbon had icons for things that weren't in the d
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be the people that AREN'T alienated by it be the people that wouldn't bother with OpenOffice?
The people who don't like it are going to be the ones trying something else. Why would the people who like it or don't care either way bother switching?
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Why choose? (Score:5, Interesting)
I take that to mean you like Office 2007 and don't see why other people wouldn't like it.
Office 2007 has a drastically different UI than just about every other GUI software ever made. The UI goes against every prior set of UI guidelines. You've got major functionality placed in a menu that normally only has window management features. You've got core functionality (save, undo) placed in the title bar. The ribbons are a mish-mash of controls with no obvious logic on how it was designed. You go across the ribbon and you'll see each set of buttons has a different style. Button sizes aren't remotely uniform. Some buttons are labelled with text while others aren't. Even within a set of related buttons (say cut/copy/paste), you get completely different styles for the buttons.
You've also got things like options organized into categories such as "Popular". It's hard to make things harder to find than that, as there isn't any way to know what category an option would fit into with categories like that.
The people most likely to not like the Office 2007 interface are the people who are familiar enough with computers to have expectations of how a UI is supposed to be designed.
People who are totally computer unsavy are just going to think it's different, neither good or bad.
Parent
Re:Why choose? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sharepoint? What a waste of money that was. There's the same docs that we had before, only now it's more clicks away and cross-linked with lots of place holder pages that make it so much more beautiful and so much less effective. We were better off when we were using a wiki. Funny how those sharepoint training classes didn't change a damn thing. I'm so surprised. God help us if engineers share information in the way that works best for them. We can't have that.
I'm glad you're finally able to outline now that the latest Microsoft product has come out, but I'm sure I'll get along just fine without it. Don't be shocked if OO does turn out to be an adequate - and free - replacement for all of most people's word processing needs. Hell, I've even seen Apple users in my office who aren't using Office. How are these people able to get any work done?!
Parent
Re:Why choose? (Score:5, Insightful)
With a perfectly good, free online alternative (i.e., Google Docs), why should anyone put their data at risk by having it stored in only one place (i.e., at home) and likely not backed up?
OK, I'm not saying Google Docs is right for everyone, but you seem to be completely dismissing the advantages of having your documents online and ignoring the disadvantages of having your documents offline.
Both approaches (online and offline) will continue to exist and thrive because different people have different needs.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I realize, though, that probably almost nobody in the general public backs up their data, but what of real value does such a user have? Some lost letter to the editor won't ruffle anyone's feathers if they lost it. Probably the more valuable data would be the working files for tax applications.
But few home users will be putting much effort into a presentation
Re:Why choose? (Score:4, Insightful)
As has been noted elsewhere, online documents are not for everyone, but anyone who really sits down for a while and starts thinking about what kinds of possibilities an online service opens up, especially in flexibility of "place", as well as on-line collaboration, will start to see some very interesting options suddenly opening up.
Parent
Re:Why choose? (Score:4, Informative)
Take their presentation software. Say I want to create a simple square on the screen, something that a lot of presentations need. On Google Docs, I have to go to a graphics package, make a picture of a square, and then import that as a picture in to the presentation. You'd better hope that it's the right size too because it's a picture, and if you resize it your line thicknesses will be changed as well. Next simple thing is fading. Snapping from one slide to another is hard on the eyes for a long period - fading from one slide to another makes it easier. Google's presentations have no transitions whatsoever.
That's just the first two obvious things that sprang up when I tested. The spreadsheet app supports enough in the way of Excel formulae to be usable but it's incredibly slow to update with changes I make, sometimes up to 2-3 seconds to do something that a desktop app would do instantly. Conditional formatting is incredibly limited and macroing is right out the window. Similarly the Word app does enough to be usable but doesn't do anything that I would consider normal on a day to day basis.
The keyboard shortcuts don't work on Firefox 2.0.0.11. A choice of somewhere between 4 and 10 fonts without the option to import any more. I mentioned the interface lag which is annoying enough to mention twice. No support for Opera, which generally means it's not web standards compliant. No spellchecker that I could find.
I could go on and on, but I won't. It might be fine for somebody to pull together a few quick sums, or write a very basic list of things to do, but for anything more than that it's crap. I've used more functionality than Google Docs provides compiling City of Heroes data on a spreadsheet and writing my resumé, and that's saying something.
So yes, use Google Apps to store your documents, but sure as hell don't try and edit them. If Google Docs is the future of web-based applications, Microsoft aren't in for any problems at all.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
This mite bee a good thyme too post this famous common tarry:
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I can create and edit documents at home and *put* them online if I choose to, through many different outlets. Private or shared. And applications like Google Docs can help in a pinch when you just want to keep a silly spreadsheet of something, or a portable document to print. You can access it at work, at home, and now on your mobile device. I can keep a running spreadsheet from anywhere - that's the point of this connected office. Microsoft just better ca
Don't be stupid. (Score:5, Interesting)
They probably appear more often on anti-MS articles because you're guaranteed more 'eyeballs' on those comments, so it's a more widespread audience for these trolls to hit.
Mod me off-topic if you like, I just wanted to correct yet another silly Slashdot assumption - this time that Microsoft somehow has a team of people posting stories about black guys with huge cocks. There's never been an iota of proof that they have anyone on here at all, other than in a casual capacity like the rest of us.
Parent
Re:Why choose? (Score:5, Interesting)
They also make a LOT of crappy software.
I've got a Google Search Appliance (the hardware/software combo to have a personal Google search). The interface is so bad, I can't believe it was made by a software company.
I run Adsense/Adwords- the interface for that is also atrocious.
Just from those quick examples, I can say that I do *not* welcome our new Google application developer overlords.
Parent
So if google is really cutting off MSes air supply (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So if google is really cutting off MSes air sup (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Who has more money? Google vs Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
Google is only worth a paltry 80 Billion in shares, etc.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Replacing Microsoft with Google will ultimately mean nothing.
Perhaps, but it's just not in the same league. You can say no to Google by just not visiting them. You can only say no to Microsoft (if you're buying a PC class machine in the US) after you've paid them for a license.
Proprietary closed-up code and vendor lock-in is bad no matter whose name you attach it to.
True, true. As is typical in discussions of technology like this, it was all hashed out on the Cypherpunks mailing list years ago. Ross Anderson has the right idea - the Eternity Service. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/eternity/eternity.html [cam.ac.uk]
and someone who was going about implementing on
The answer is obvious (Score:5, Funny)
Define "cloud." (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, take the Google model of massively distributed computing and apply it to the whole ecosystem of net-enabled devices. The future will probably be a lot weirder than we think.
your whole model needs to be re-evaluated (Score:3, Funny)
In other words, take the consulting model of highly topical verbose lexicon, and apply it to a popular internet
Re:Define "cloud." (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason I sometimes trot this odd, non-technical definition out is that planners sometimes get tripped up over questions like "should we have one database or many databases?" However, it's often question that doesn't mean what they think it means. Placing all your eggs in one database basket doesn't unify them into a working system. It doesn't tell one part of your organization what the other is up to. It doesn't mean that giving one group control over a certain set of data gives them any other rights they shouldn't have. On the other hand, an "isolated database" may consume or produce data from other databases in a way that implies controlling that physical resource isn't the whole story about controlling data quality or limiting data distribution.
The point is that the number of "databases", if you count them the way a database platform vendor would, is really just an implementation detail.
The question you raise about the definition of "server" has already been raised by projects like Seti@Home or distributed.net. As a contributor to such projects, your control over your "slice" of the massive project is limited pretty much to opting in or out. Arguably with the distributed systems that are common for high traffic Internet sites, for electronic data interchange systems of nearly any kind, even for a simple server cluster, an individual server is not really all that important.
The important questions for a project include: Where is the bulk of policy created? How are policies enforced? What are the options and rewards, if any, offered to participants?
While "servers" as we think of them are a key part of the infrastructure, we're well beyond the point where they are a single point of control for a major project.
Parent
the best quote (Score:4, Insightful)
If we need proof that MS is the new IBM, i.e. delusional in the belief that it is the one and only solution for the customer, this is it.
It is certain that MS now has one of the best solution for corporate on the PC. It is equally certain due to the overhead incurred to defend and maintain the PC, MS does not have the best solution for the home PC. By maintaining the applications on a central server, for free or nearly free, Google has the benefits of the central server in IBM days with the cost benefit that MS supplied. Add to that the idea that many people would now would be happy with an appliance, recall that many people do not work in an office, and one has an opportunity for competition. MS is not doing well in the living room, only in the game room.
I wonder if MS can live in a world where it does not get a cut out of every PC sold. Where more machines, like the OLPC, are not designed to run MS Windows, and therefore cannot be catagorized as a pirate's dream machine if sold naked, or with a non-MS OS. I wonder how many web designers are going to continue to design IE only websites if only 10% of the population browse using a non-MS compatible hardware.
MS creates adequate products, but like IBM they have it wrong. Google is not the arrogant company. MS is. By creating a new os that costs more than the computer. By not suppling IE to all major OS. By waiting 5 years to admit that multiplatform means more than just running on different versions of MS Windows, and interoperability is not bad for the end user.
Let me also say that I would not use Google Apps, not for anything important, but I am not the target audience. I can maintain my own machine and download and install OSS. The world where everyone uses google is not much less scary than the world we are in now. OTOH, at least my office might not tell me that everyone uses MS, and that is all they will support on the website.
Desktop For Me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Desktop For Me (Score:4, Informative)
Then things quickly would grind to a halt because of network bandwidth issues, someone accidentally unplugged an access point, etc. It's a mess. For the first few months we would get periodic emails saying how great it was, when *we* would be moving to 'the workspace of the future', et all. I've stopped getting those emails all of a sudden...
Last I heard they're rethinking the whole ordeal, have now issued everyone *real laptops*, and are remoting into a real PC.
Now, for the real post.
Did we learn anything in the world of main frames? It seems that we've come full circle from the time where we all had to take turns for CPU cycles...We've gone from 'dumb terminals' to the PC revolution, to the 'network' and now back to centralized, smart-dumb terminals again. Please, lets go back to the desktop PC before its too late...
Parent
Re:Desktop For Me (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
What about the users? (Score:4, Insightful)
What about the users interests?
Honestly it seems very clear to me that suddenly having to be connected to the internet (with all its associated performance and security issues) just to do do something like write or store a document would be a giant step backwards.
I don't get it, something is backassward here... (Score:4, Insightful)
Its not like any company today can't have their own inhouse server for inhouse control and security and online limited access.
With todays desktop system power and terabyte drives isn't it more likely that what's online now can become offline accessible. In other words, its more likely that we move data from online to offline than vise versa. I've recently put together a localhost LAMP/desktop system just because I found wordpress on firefox to be versatile and simple enough for my aging mother to write her autobiography on while dealing with some eye sight problems (ctrl-+/- zooms) with easy pictures addin. And just because its on a system not connected to the internet the export/import function of wordpress allows the data to be put online should she so chose (she could send me a cd for me to import to a family site I set up - but by her choice, not due some leaky internet).
So even internet applications can be moved to the internet disconnected desktop, where there is security and performance in not being connected,.
Certainly any businesss applications no more needs the additional possible failures and security breaches of internet connection, ISP problems and weakest link connection than does home applications with slower or no internet connections.
Sorry Google, but really, your search engine suffers more and more from ad based listings rather than what I'm looking for (i.e. looking for specification information on an old Dell Latitude xp 450c laptop results in endless finding for batteries, power adaptors, etc sellers.... and virtually no links I could find of any use to me.... I can only wonder who all these sellers are selling to.)
Just as hardware became commodity ... (Score:3, Interesting)
If this prediction is true, then Microsoft is still in the driver's seat relative to Google. They are a player in the virtualization market, and they have applications that people will want, albeit in a slightly different form, so they can be run on their Macs, Linux boxes or Windows boxes.
Interesting read (Score:4, Insightful)
What also struck me was the tired old soundbites from MS representatives - "The focus is on competitive self-interest; it's on trying to undermine Microsoft, rather than what customers want to do," says Mr. Raikes of Google. Yeah Raikes - your development cycle (or rather complete lack of it for 3+ years after you had destroyed Netscape) on IE fits that quote very nicely. The words from MS all sound a bit wooden - they are trying to come out with all the "we are cool" "googleplex" mentality of roller blading employees who are living the dream - but it doesn't stick - we know how things go on in MS land - the coder who spent a couple of years jumping through bureaucratic hoops of reviews, reports and presentations to simply code the log off button on the start menu for vista tells us that. Gabe Newell got it spot on - MS has become what IBM was when MS were starting up - one vast bureaucracy - MS chided IBM in those days just as Google can rightfully do of MS today. I don't think Gabe extended the analogy, but it fits perfectly that IBM were attempting to cling on to the last of the "mainframe days" back then, just as MS are attempting to cling on to the "standalone desktop days" now. We are entering another paradigm shift - and the more MS say that we aren't the more it confirms that we are.
A war on two fronts (Score:4, Insightful)
Thusfar Microsoft has obtained and held its position using the classic strategies of a monopolist. Those won't work against Linux because Linux can't be bought. Microsoft can't even cut off its air supply.
Even if Microsoft wins its battle against Google, it can't kill Google because Google is a giant even if its online applications don't fly.
Microsoft is in real trouble. Google and Linux are both disruptive technologies. As is typical with disruptive technologies, they will eventually become 'good enough' for the majority of Microsoft's customers.
At this point, given the choice between giving my mother (who lives a thousand miles away) a computer loaded with Ubuntu or one loaded with Vista, I would easily choose Ubuntu. I suspect that many of us would make the same choice. Next year, things will change and more of us would choose Ubuntu. That's the way it works with disruptive technologies.
I have a suggestion for Microsoft. Give the customers something that delights them and doesn't get in their way every five minutes. As it is, Microsoft is driving its customers into the enemy's waiting arms.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft internet: supporting only IE, IIS (Score:3, Insightful)
While the web apps department may be all OK with just service revenue and advertising the big wigs in other departments will make sure that the 'embrace and extend' goes into their on-line offerings in order to 'encourage' use of Microsoft enabled PCs and servers to fully utilize those services.
I for one am very resistant into inserting intentional quirks and other bits of muck in my web apps to satisfy a non-standard approach to displaying HTML/CSS and help enable it to be more popular. Firefox, Safari, Konquerer, Opera, Galeon, etc. all render my pages fine with the standards, and I don't have to use MS servers, browsers or OSs (though they work fine as well, only not IE, but there are free alternatives).
Also as far as services, from my point of view (Firefox on Linux) many of the MS technology based sites show up as like broken crap to me (does not support my browser, features not working, pages render poorly, etc.)
Google gets it's high marks because they are not locking the customer (business or user) into a specific application or platform; got Linux, Xserve, MS IIS, that's OK, just add this and you are good. Browser? - is it up to date? Then you are good there too. Like many say of OS X, Google internet tools and results usually "Just Work" and if you start there you probably aren't concerned into looking for other places after that.
Fundamental issues with hosted apps (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest one, blessing and curse in one, is that there's a 1:1 relationship between client app and service. The hosted app provider controls the client used to access the app as well, something that tends to result in smoother integration, but also a lack of choice.
Consider mail. Few of us would like to have a specific mail client forced on us by an ISP - yet that's exactly what web mail providers do. For mail, people are happy enough to just move to the provider with a client they're happy with, but that won't be possible for all types of app. I'm very dubious about the unification of storage, communication protocol and client into a single entity.
Web apps also make it harder to apply policy. How can you, with web apps, have a shared working directory with snapshots taken every five minutes (aged out progressively) that gets automatically archived into another part of your system & indexed at the end of the week? It's not easy, that's for sure. Businesses with access control requirements, data retention issues, etc also face issues.
Even if the provider tries to take care of those problems, they'll have a hard time making it easy to integrate things like archival with the rest of your network.
The admin also tends to lose insight into the system with web apps. If I hosted my business's mail with Google, I wouldn't get access to the mail logs, control over spam filter sensitivity, or other important facilities. That's not inherently the case, in that Google could offer these facilities, but in general web apps tend to take more of a black box approach.
In short
--
Craig Ringer
Re:Failure is likely (Score:5, Insightful)
It's kind of fun to watch them get hit with it again and this time by a much more mature and cash-rich adversary.
Parent
Great point (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Failure is likely (Score:5, Interesting)
Just recently I've started playing with a Mac and so far I'm pleased with what it can do.
All that to say, Google is decidedly not making the desktop moot. I'm sure there are quite a few people out there like me who prefer managing and storing information locally.
Parent
MS have tried moving off-desktop (Score:5, Insightful)
They have tried Windows CE which still has a shrinking market share in phones, but attempts to leverage the desktop experience, so is doomed.
They've tried tablets... at least 4 times now... and these still get mindshare at MS because they are Billy-boy's pet PC format. Again, doomed because they try to make the tablet into a desktop-like device.
It is often said that excessive success brings about a downfall. For MS this is true. The desktop has been so successful for them that they are not able to see past it.
Parent
Re:Failure is likely (Score:5, Insightful)
Without a desktop - be it Windows, OSX, iPhone, Symbian etc. - Google wouldn't be accessible, or exist.
I think that long-term you'll see a compromised middle ground appear. Information needs to be centralized and always available, and the computing power used to act on it needs to be localized. Information in a single place can end up being virtually useless if you can't get to it, and the frustrations of not having local computing power to hand are exactly what killed mainframe and thin-client computing.
So, I think you'll see a dominant online Google (aren't they already?) and a still-powerful client/server-bound Microsoft. They're both companies that have their fingers in a lot of pots - some successful, some not, but it's in the public interests that they both exist, if either one extinguished the other, it would be bad for everyone.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh yeah, that explains the success of Microsoft Games and Microsoft Hardware in a nutshell. Oh wait no it doesn't... I seem to have no problems at all playing my Xbox 360 or using my Microsoft-branded keyboard on my Apple G5 computer.
(Christ, do you people engage your brains for even a fraction of a second before modding BS like this up?)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You probably could have come up with that if you'd given it a half second's thought.
Re:business apps (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And why the fuck is this crap modded to +5 (informative of all things?)
Hint: My browser is about as much a desktop application as it gets (hint: that textbox isnt some fancy ajax wordprocessor). And yes, just to annoy you, i didnt even write this in the browser, but in notepad.
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Not realize, exactly what they were planning for.. (Score:3, Interesting)