Changing Climates for Microsoft and Google 393
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."
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:google is (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:click once and be pwned (Score:2, Interesting)
Neither of us will convince the other on this point, so I won't try.
If, a year or two from now, .net 2.0 (or whatever version it's up to by then) is stable and secure, I will say, "Shit, I was wrong."
I ask only: if, a year or two from now, there is some undreamt-of new "impossible" attack against or subversion of the idea, such that people are clicking once and getting pwned all the time, you do the same.
The best Virtual Machine? (Score:4, Interesting)
If it's the best then why doesn't it work on a Mac or Linux?
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.
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.
Re:click once and be pwned (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 matter of exploiting those security bugs, I don't exactly get that 'warm and fuzzy' feeling about One-Click installs of applications from the Internet, an inherently untrustworthy network.
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.
Re:google is (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:click once and be pwned (Score:3, Interesting)
In my experience
A few answers for you (Score:2, Interesting)
Market cap, obtained via a illegal and uethical business practices. So no. I have more respect for Warren Buffet as he earned his money. Wealth does not automatically bring respect.
Destop domination, no. Obtained through illegal and unethical means.
The opinion of college students? No, they usually have nothing in thier experience to foster a good opinion. Though some are sharp and if they come from a non-trad background (older, ran thier own business, prodigies etc.) I might listen.
Gate's charity? Obtained through illegal and unethical means. Therefore it is blood money. Just because someone is wealthy and donates to charity does not mean they should be respected. Respect should be reserved for those who work hard and obtain thier goals via legal, ethical and moral means.
But that's just my opinion.
Re:Strike Three - You're Out! (Score:3, Interesting)
To benchmark these is complicated as
DotNET has a couple technical shortcomings when it comes to performance, one being the impossibility of fast interpretation of bytecodes (the instructions depend on the argument types so can't be easily dispatched). Another is using "real" generics, which they thought would improve speed by avoiding some box/unbox operations but it also leads to type explosions and, slow instanceof and casts (for example you could use so much memory just due to instantiated types that CLR has to constantly throw away older code and re-JIT, not to mention poor use of cache).
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?
Re:difference between google and microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
Very strange