Gates on Google

EnsignExtra writes " A long and interesting article in Fortune on the battle between Gates and Google. 'Forced to watch Google's stock soar the way Microsoft's used to, and Brin and Page enjoy their roles as tech's new rock stars, Gates brings to the fight a ferocity that nobody has seen since the Netscape war a decade ago. Their popularity gets under his skin. "There's companies that are just so cool that you just can't even deal with it," he says sarcastically, suggesting that Google is nothing more than the latest fad, adding, "At least they know to wear black."...Trying to build a Google killer, however, has turned out to be truly humbling for Microsoft.'"

Re:Innovate, not copy

[baadger]

Direct quote from the article.

"I remember when [Payne's team] showed off their first prototype in early 2004people laughed because it was so much like Google," says a former Microsoft executive. "We had copied them. That's not how you lead."

They even admit copying the top dogs.

Re:One statment in the article is not true...

[smellystudent]

...or because Opera and Firefox have a Google search field in the toolbars already and don't need a third party to add the functionality?

Re:One statment in the article is not true...

[Tx]

Or maybe because they know the open source community will fill that gap, probably in better ways. I mean, how many ways do Firefox users have to use google - Googlbar/Googlebar lite, quick searches, "i feel lucky" via the address bar, the built-in search box of course, etc.

Re:Another day.. another google story..

[baadger]

I've never had an error on Google.

I have. They look like this [inluminent.com]

Re:One statment in the article is not true...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mozilla/Firefox/Opera do not have the google toolbar."

You are wrong, and I dub thee "fuckbeak" for the error...

Google Toolbar Firefox Extension: (there are actually multiple flavours)
https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/morei nfo.php?id=33 [mozilla.org]

Re:There's no need to fear...

[circusboy]

the butthole surfers do the best version of this song...
there's a clip [amazon.com] here.

(amazon's clips seem to be mostly wmv, sorry)

Re:GOffice?

[popeyethesailor]

Well IMHO, thats completely wrong - they are only interested in peddling their content. Nothing more.

I wonder why people cant see this ; developing and supporting major applications like wordprocessors and browsers are a total money drain. And that field is a mature field- there is not much innovation to be done there.

The innovation will be in the value additions. If you have MS Office 2k3, try doing an Alt+Click. A neat little Research pane pops up, within which you can do web searches, encarta lookups etc. without opening a browser. Users love gizmos like this - they feel it is a real convenience for them.

I expect google to keep producing these little searchlets (you heard it here first, folks!). For eg, an ActiveX google search control for your MS office application. Voila, search from within Outlook, Excel,Word,Powerpoint the whole shebang! Add spellcheck to it, smart-tag lookups, search-as-you-type in a document etc etc.

This war is not to produce the greatest app, not to be cross-platform, not to beat MS, and definitely not about being a top software vendor.

It is for your eyeballs - the more you see their content, the more the money they'll make.

.NET

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Microsoft, once it owned the bulk of the market, has been a second-mover.

I don't know whether you do any business programming, but the momentum behind C# and .NET is just massive. There are on the order of terabytes and terabytes of code that have been [or are being] written for that platform.

Now you could say that Sun was the "first mover" with Java, and M$FT was the "second mover" with .NET, but my point is that just because M$FT has been working quietly behind the scenes on something like .NET doesn't mean they aren't innovating. It's just that they're innovating [and grabbing market share] in an arena that isn't quite as sexy as Google, iTunes, or Playstation.

picasa

[yagu]

Well, I'm not even entirely through the article, but when you read something like: manage, edit, and send digital photographs using Google's Picasa software, easily the best PC photo software out there;..., the author does much to discredit him(her)self. First, there aren't many products that qualify for the descriptors "easily the best" in anything, and second Picasa isn't, (and third Google didn't even write Picasa, they purchased it). It's a great piece of software, but it ain't the best, and it ain't even close.

Google is doing some great stuff, but let's not genuflect when they sneeze.

Re:.NET

[smittyoneeach]

Now you could say that Sun was the "first mover" with Java, and M$FT was the "second mover" with .NET, but my point is that just because M$FT has been working quietly behind the scenes on something like .NET doesn't mean they aren't innovating.

That is exactly my point. .Net is far more evolutionary than revolutionary. Not to say that Anders Hjelsberg isn't 16 times the hacker I'll ever be.
Sure, the .Net momentum is massive, and the C# codebase will only grow faster if Mono ever gains traction in the FOSS world.
TFA article touched on the browser war from the standpoint of MS crushing Netscape on price.
Where there article didn't seem to go was into the anxiety in Redmond when they realized that the browser could diminish the importance of the desktop OS in a major way, which is where I was going with the point about Google partnering with Apple (admittedly unlikely, given the personalities in question) or Google rolling a killer Linux distribution (feel the waves of fear emanating from the NorthWest...)

Re:Never write off Microsoft...

[jwinter1]

[T]he reason why MSIE destroyed Netscape's dominance wasn't its superiority, it was because MSIE was just there, an easy mouse click away on every new Windows 95 PC, whereas Navigator wasn't, and needed to be installed from scratch.

Not really. The fact that IE was right on the desktop was certainly part of its success, but IE 5 was substantially better than Netscape 4. Believe me, I was a stalwart Netscape user until a coworker showed me how much faster IE was rendering pages. Netscape then threw out their codebase to build Gecko and couldn't get anything decent out the door for way too long. They also lost jwz along the way, which I'm sure didn't help matters.

Re:WTF with Google anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use gmail regularly, and I can tell you that the main draw for me is not the stoarage, it's hands-down the interface.

I feel I fit into the sector of the population who could set up a mail server(and webmail, imap, etc) very quickly and easily, however the interface used by gmail appeals to me more then thunderbird, evolution, or (god-forbid) outlook. I use thunderbird for work-related email, however, I find that the gmail interface gives a very straight-forward, easy to use interface that reminds me of the older text-based email clients (like pine or mutt) combined with the ease of use of the gui in thunderbird or evolution. That and the way it treats emails (as conversations) avoids the need to look at heavily quoted emails and find what is being replied to, I can simply show or hide the older pieces of a thread.

Basically, I would say that if google offered an "intranet" version for corporations, I'd highly reccomend it to management.

Re:Microsoft's Underdog

[ZP_558963]

Microsoft has a long way to go to catch up to google. First thing they need to do is speed up their Infrastructure. Especially with the speed and acuracy of their web search. Another problem is the fact that they use advertisements slowing down the website greatly. True google is an advertiser, but images in their search engine are small, minimal, and no advertisements.

Lastly, the number of useful and inovative projects google has produced makes microsoft look bad. This only leaves copycat items for Microsoft to produce. Here are some tools sites by google. http://www.google.com/options/ [google.com], http://labs.google.com/ [google.com], http://www.google.com/about.html [google.com]. Strange thing is I can't find anything for Microsoft search tools being produced. http://www.msn.com/ [msn.com]

Re:.NET

[smittyoneeach]

Bill Gates would be perfectly happy to see other platforms choke on a big stick and die.

Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] offers a slightly more detailed view:

Through the 1990s, personal computers based on Microsoft's Windows operating system began to gain a much larger percentage of new computer users than Apple. As a result, Apple fell from controlling 20% of the total personal computer market to 5% by the end of the decade. The company was struggling financially under then-CEO Gil Amelio when on August 6, 1997 Microsoft bought a $150 million non-voting share of the company as a result of a court settlement with Apple (Microsoft has since sold all Apple stock holdings). Perhaps more significantly, Microsoft simultaneously announced its continued support for Mac versions of its office suite, Microsoft Office, and soon created a Macintosh Business Unit. This reversed the earlier trend within Microsoft that resulted in poor Mac versions of their software and has resulted in several award-winning releases.

Although your analysis may well be correct, there is at least a fig leaf in place to ward off the lustful eye of anti-trust regulators...

Re:Innovate, not copy

[Blitter]

MS's only big software innovation has been integration. They realised that people don't want programs. They want a computer. One thing that does everything in a consistent joined up manner.

This was one of the ideas behind the Macintosh. Gates saw it and Windows followed.

I would also say that ASP pages were innovative - not so much the idea of templates, but the idea of creating a proper web SDK

NeXT's WebObjects predated ASP by about a year I believe.

Re:Innovate, not copy

[m50d]

Huh? I'd never seen a GUI set up that way before. It was innovative, just horrible.

Re:Innovate, not copy

[bani]

You have a bunch of very odd ideas about Linux and Unix, basic misconceptions which rendered your entire argument fatally flawed.

ls, echo, system(), select(), etc. are all defined in the POSIX standard. Hell, even basic shells, shell syntax, job control, and redirection are defined. Anything which wants to be POSIX standards compliant must implement them.

Your claim that Linux "copies/mimics/re-implements" Unix is about as valid as claiming GCC "copies/mimics/re-implements" microsoft visual c++ because GCC implements ISO 9899:1999 (ANSI C).

What's next, claiming Mozilla copies IE because they both display HTML?

You claimed linux copies, and I pointed out it doesn't. In fact the whole point of Linux is that it doesn't copy or mimic or re-implement (and Linux is often criticized on this basis -- for doing things "differently"). Though SCO would have you believe otherwise.

This isn't minutiae.