Microsoft Loses Key Engineer to Google 475
galdur writes "Microsoft Watch reports Marc Lucovsky, one of Microsoft's key Windows architects has defected to Google. His confidence in Microsoft's ability to ship software seems to have waned, too. Some hypothesize Google working on an OS but in the wake of Google's inroads into Ajax tech applications (GMail, Suggest, Maps), I think Google may have other plans for the chief software architect for Microsoft's .Net My Services ("Hailstorm")" CT Many users are reporting 404s on the Microsoft Watch article, but its working fine for others. Hopefully they'll fix their server soon.
Is it ethical? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is it ethical? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's like asking if it's ethical for there to be more than 1 company on the planet.
Predictions of Doom (Score:3, Insightful)
Google News (Score:2, Insightful)
2. This guy made a point of explaining in his blog (when it was up) that Microsoft doesn't ship software, and he admires that Amazon ships software immediately, via the web. Google would obviously appeal to him for this reason.
Re:The Bullet (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Google OS (Score:5, Insightful)
Even Apple is struggling agains Windows and they already have a superior desktop OS, and penetration in audio/video and design markets.
Heck, look at even Linux. It's free, it's useable, it's secure. And it took Linux a long time to be considered a viable desktop alternative.
I like Google's services, but I don't think they could pull off a profitable OS.
You may have heard of Mark... (Score:5, Insightful)
AJAX... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google OS (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, Google's main expertise is in the field of searching, and so far, literally ALL of its products services have been based around that. Where would an operating system fit in there?
not an *OS* - a platform (Score:5, Insightful)
Web apps are pretty nice these days: use a browser that supports XUL like Firefox and it's not dissimilar to a real, locally installed app. And who's partnering with Firefox....?
Re:The Bullet (Score:5, Insightful)
*cough*Corel*cough* (WordPerfect anyone?)
*cough*IBM*cough* (What did they do to OS/2 again?)
I am SURE there are others. Those weren't, for their time, "small" companies with no money to defend themselv's.
Re:Google OS (Score:3, Insightful)
Think Xbox. The goal of the xbox was not profit. It was to reduce the % of market-share owned by the PS2 (and to some extent GameCube) so that the Xbox 2 would have a larger profitability margin and have a wider selection of games (meaming Microsoft intends to actually make $$ on the hardware this time).
Re:Google OS (Score:5, Insightful)
Google Chat
Google IM
Google portal
Google hosting
Google Forum's
A Google version of .Net Passport
Google WAP and mobile device services (which would make sense if you take into account the recent push for technology in this area).
They are definately in a position to do such thing's without placing too much effort into other area's of the I.T world. I can not see Google creating an OS, licensing that goes with it, HCL's etc etc.
Re:Is it ethical? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Google OS (Score:2, Insightful)
However, it seems to me that the payoff would not be so great in the end. The consumer would just say: "Why would I pay 300 bucks for a GoogleOS, when I can get Windows for 150?"
No matter what Google offers, Microsoft can undercut it.
And in the end, Google is for the most part OS independant. Their focus is on using the Web, what could they possibly gain by having the control of the hardware on a user's PC? This way Microsoft has to deal with all the drivers and security issues, Google just rides for free on top of it.
Re:Is it ethical? (Score:2, Insightful)
Poaching may or may not be ethical.
But,"turnabout is fair play," or in other cliche, "what's good for the goose is good for gander."
See: Borland Brain Drain Continues [eweek.com]
Re:Is it ethical? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm, isn't it what Microsoft does all the time (attracting them.. but also just buying out their competitors).
Besides, it's not like after you've worked somewhere you must refrain from ever again working anywhere else ever. Contracts usually have no-competition clauses, but they have to be limited to reasonable demands. Google will just use Marc in ways that don't go agains the clause..
Right now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait, don't mod this as 'funny' because I'm completely serious.
From what we know about Sir Bill, he easily loses his temper, especially when someone other than Microsoft is succeeding in the technology marketplace. Google is succeeding at doing many of the things Microsoft wants to be doing right now. Google is taking the 'net to the next level -- they're turning it into a "platform" the way Netscape wanted to. Netscape failed to do this mainly because their engineers got a little too full of themselves a little too quickly, but Google appears to not be making this mistake. They're careful about who they hire and they're careful not to make too much of their own noise -- they just create new technology and let the buzz appear on its own.
Right now, Bill Gates is in his office screaming at his top-level henchmen. He's ordering them to do whatever it takes to kill Google, just as he ordered them to do whatever it takes to kill Netscape back in 1997.
It's going to be an ugly show.
Re:Yes, Google OS (Score:3, Insightful)
Change your definition of "thin" and "apps" and it's happening now. What is slashdot, if not a web app? What's my PII with it's 20GB hard drive, if not a thin client? ( not that it's what I'm using now, but it would work, I'm making a point here ).
they could easily repurpose a linux distro + wine + firefox into a very OSX like OS for intel/amd that is, to some extent, windows compatible.
"easily" is a matter of opinion, but "why" and how successful it would be are different matters, since what you're talking about already exists in one form or another. What I'm looking for is the business case... and it's just not there. Google's services ( like Yahoo's ) aren't about thin clients, they're about accessing data regardless of what computer you're using ( and leveraging search tech to organize it all and sell targeted ads ). Making a multi-OS browser makes sense for them. Making a server-side development platform makes sense for them. Making an OS? Not so much. They have an OS- it's called Linux.
And, yes, they really are just another "yahoo-like empire" in the final analysis... they just seem to be looking to out-Yahoo Yahoo. Given the success of Yahoo, even with how Yahoo has stagnated over the past few years, it seems like a good plan to me - there's plenty of room to improve on Yahoo, as Google has already shown.
It seems he's being a little hard on MS (Score:5, Insightful)
When a Microsoft engineer fixes a minor defect, makes something faster or better, makes an API more functional and complete, how do they "ship" that software to me? I know the answer and so do you... The software sits in a source code control system for a minimum of two years (significantly longer for some of the early Longhorn code). At some point, the product that the fix is a part of will "ship" meaning that CD's will be pressed and delivered to customers and OEM's. In best case scenarios, the software will reach end users a few months after the Release To Manufacturing (RTM) date. In many cases, particularly for users working in large corporations, they won't see the software for a year or more post RTM...
While this is true of major software releases and service packs, it's certainly not true of critical updates, is it? And besides, software on the scale of Longhorn or Office 2006 is vastly different than a point-and-click problem on a web page.
Re:Apple's OSX (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks for understanding. To be fair, i get annoyed at all the Linux plugs too. I know that this is a geek site, but some of them are just retarded:
poster1: I hate how Windows XP groups stuff together into this little list in the Taskbar.
poster2: You should just switch to linux. If you run KDE on mandrake, all you have to do is hand edit the
poster3: That's a lot of work! you should switch to Gentoo, where all you have to do is 'emerge -03 --no_group KDE' and you're done!
I guess now it's the Age Of The Apple Partyline...
thanks.
Re:AJAX... (Score:2, Insightful)
AJAX is a confusing term since remove scripting doesn't have to use XML (what the X in AJAX stands for surprisingly) infact JSON would be a much better format.
Re:You may have heard of Mark... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh no it shouldn't.
Before this newborn word draws breath, let us strangle it in its crib, as we should have done for "normalcy", "incent", and "misunderestimate".
How can MS kill Google? (Score:5, Insightful)
Good post, BTW.
As I understand it, MS killed Netscape by giving away IE and bundling IIS with Windows. How could Netscape survive if they had to give away their product for free to compete? They weren't a services company like Google (not mostly, anyway).
Google is different. Google gives all of its products (services) away for free already (not counting its appliances, which are niche products). The end-users get all of Google's services for free. So how can Microsoft kill Google? How can Microsoft take away their revenue stream? Just as MS has critical mass with Windows, Google has critical mass with search and AdWords. How can either overcome the other in their respective areas? (Not that I think Google is going to make an OS; that would make no sense at all to me.)
Why would Google create their own OS? (Score:4, Insightful)
Given the low margins, intense competition, high barriers-to-entry (like MSFT's 95% desktop market share), high initial capital investment required (startup costs), and so on, I really don't see a market for a new OS at all. There's no way Google can market a proprietary OS to compete in the server space -- Linux, being free, is dominating there (alongside Win2k/2k3), and will for the foreseeable future. The desktop space is even bleaker, again, due to MSFT's controlling 95% of the market and the massive installed base of users, apps, etc. that goes along with such a large user base.
I truly don't understand the reasoning behind a supposed Google OS... They have made themselves a fantastic info warehouse/data-mining portal for the masses, making knowledge & info formerly only barely-available to wealthy customers available to everyone for nearly-free, leveraging the "market" of links available on trillions of webpages (among other factors in their algorithm, no doubt). But that's a set of services best provided to existing OS's over the Internet - not from a brand-new OS.
Now, if Google is going to make a modified GNU/Linux distribution... that could have some considerable potential, b/c much of the heavy-lifting has already been done and there's a large enough base of users they could cater to... But what would they offer over other Linux distros to make Google's distro stand out? A better file-searching tool, probably, but what else? A replacement for X11/XOrg? Perhaps not, as this is entering ito GUI coding, something they as a company don't do much of - or at least, the GUI stuff they do isn't made public (the desktop search and IE Google bar aside)...
So even on that idea, I'm having a hard time imagining what they have up their sleeve, and therefore, a hard time imagining why they'd bother in the first place.
Re:Is it ethical? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's not even a shred of ethical dilemma here.
The simple economic fact is that Microsoft didn't compete hard enough to keep that developer, and now he's gone -- too bad, tough shit to MSFT, and now Google is one (presumably) very-competent architect richer, at the expense of probably six-figures a year in salary and benefits from Google. But Google believes he's worth it, so they're happy; Marc Lucovsky is happier at Google, else he wouldn't have jumped ship, and MSFT - well, who knows whether they care or not.
Perhaps MSFT cares - perhaps they valued Lucovsky enough to keep him at the conditions of his previous employ, but clearly they didn't value him enough to keep him at newer, higher conditions which in Lucovsky's mind beat the conditions of working at Google. And perhaps MSFT doesn't care at all; that they think they can get along just fine without him - we don't know, and probably won't know for a long time, if ever.
In the end, this is a nice example of labor economics benefiting the laborer (Lucovsky), by his playing a game of wage/benefits/happiness shopping, and "buying" the package Google offered while "selling" the package MSFT was providing. Again, there is not even a *shred* of ethical dilemma here...
If I can't convince you on the sheer fundamental economics of the situation (in which case, please try Econ101 sometime), can I at least get you on a "Microsoft is evil, so it's good that quality developers are jumping ship" argument?
Re:Former Microsoftie Here (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no chance whatsoever that Google will set out to build its own OS. Linux works perfectly well and Google is well aware that they have more to gain by contributing to the common development pool.
No, Google is setting out to build a web service infrastructure, powered by its 100,000 node (at last count) Linux supercomputer. And after all, this guy's job at Microsoft was to build a web infrastructure.
By the way, it is very doubtful that in California he can be prevented from working in his area of expertise, no matter what his employment contract with Microsoft says.
Re:Is it ethical? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't worry, the solution is already here: hire foreigners with H-1B visas. That way, if they quit working for your company, they get deported back to their home country. It's like slavery, except better because you don't have to feed and house them yourself.
Re:Is it ethical? (Score:5, Insightful)
As for leaving one company to go to a competitor, I see no problem with that. It's not like corporations have loyalty to their employees and guarantee a job until retirement. Why should employees have the loyalty to stay with an employer until the employer decides the employee is no longer wanted? Is someone morally bound to stay with one company that they're not happy at if the only companies who would pay the same or better money for their skill set happen to be competitors?
Now, certainly to give trade secrets from your former employer to your new employer would be unethical and most likely illegal, but an employer can not reasonably claim that all of their employee's knowledge and skills can be classified as trade secrets.
I'd hope the people at Google are smart enough not to hire someone away because they hope to steal some future Microsoft product. But regardless of what you think of Microsoft, you have to admit they employ some smart people, and Google wants smart people. Are they supposed to find smart people with no prior experience in software development and teach them how to program?
Name One? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this just barely exceeds your statute of limitations, but how about two:
Sun (Solaris 2.x was their "NT")
Apple (Mac OS X)
This isn't to belittle Microsoft's accomplishment, but to claim they are the only company would be in error, as several OS vendors have had to go through at least one overhaul, and convince their user bases to stick with them through the transition.
Re:Microsoft's business is RESELLING, not MAKING S (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google OS (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember when Microsoft was installed on over 95% of the world's desktops?
Re:Non-competes non-enforceable in California (Score:3, Insightful)
Typically, they won't bother with the non-compete clauses when you're in a state that prohibits them and holds right to work over all else- it's much, much more expensive than it's ever worth to them to keep an employee working for a competitor.