Google a "Wake-Up Call" For Microsoft

wooha points out coverage of a talk Microsoft's chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, gave at a Goldman Sachs conference in Las Vegas. Ozzie said that watching Google rake in advertising revenue was a wake-up call within Microsoft. He said Microsoft plans to do more than simply follow Google's lead by creating Web-based versions of desktop programs or duplicating its search and advertising model. (Despite Microsoft's massive investment in promoting and improving Web-based search, the company still has less than 10% of search engine market share, compared to Google's ~50% and growing.) Ozzie, who has only made a few appearances since his promotion last June to replace Bill Gates as CSA, told analysts and investors that he has been laying the groundwork for programmers across the company to build Internet-based software.

Moo

[Apocalypse111]

And thus, Microsoft continues its grand tradition of being late to the scene, introducing technologies we've been seeing for years in a new and annoying format, and generally maintaining the status quo in the fashion to which we have become accustomed. Mediocrity, ho!

This is news?

[DelawareBoy]

Come on.. This really isn't news. Does anyone not believe Google is a wakeup call to Microsoft? And if Steve Balmer's Chair throwing is any indication, they were aware of it long before Ray Ozzie was promoted to CSA.

"build Internet-based software"

[Anomalyst]

Ah yes, the infamous MS "innovation" of follow the leader (badly).

Waking Dream?

[griffjon]

Microsoft didn't "wake up" to the right set of ideas - it's not google's services that are beating Microsoft into the ground, it's their general openness and interoperability. Microsoft can put Office online and create a search technology that can find a needle in a haystack not even linked by RFID tags to the tubes, but if they continue to play their embrace/extend/extinguish games instead of opening up, as an internal cultural change, what they produce will continue to be hindered by this proprietary mindset.

(It's not even like they have to jump ship into OSS - Google's technology by and large is closed source, they just play ball better)

Internet-based?

[TWX]

Ozzie, who has only made a few appearances since his promotion last June to replace Bill Gates as CSA, told analysts and investors that he has been laying the groundwork for programmers across the company to build Internet-based software.

You mean, ActiveX-based software, right? It's not like these applications are going to really function on any platform other than Internet Explorer (and even then, probably 6.0 MINIMALLY) and Windows XP, and there will be no support for Linux, UNIX, OSX, Windows 2000, etc...

Google offers a great opportunity for those who want to break themselves of the Microsoft habit. Cross-platform, functional on multiple OSes, web browsers, and with minimal requirements.

"Integrating" them into the OS.

[khasim]

Remember, Microsoft still has their desktop monopoly. That gives them the edge is "integrating" new tech.

Which is also why Microsoft cannot follow Google's lead on this. Microsoft's revenue is based upon the concept of:
one user
per physical box
per licensed OS copy
per licensed office suit copy.

Microsoft will not do anything that could harm those revenue streams.

Google is cherry picking MSFT's lunch

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The most difficult market to take out of MSFT's grasp is the Office software, with legacy files, macros, APIs, integration with workflow etc. And since Office is tied to Windows OS, it allows MSFT to continually tweak the OS, foist upgrades in a never ending cycle. But another big cake in MSFT's plate is the license revenue from the Microsoft Exchange Server. It is not bulk priced, every email id created by the its corporate clients not MSFT, creates license revenue for MSFT. This is the market most easily wrenched from MSFT's grasp.

A good browser is all the interface needed to deliver email. And not being tied to a machine but being available over the net is a useful thing. So the Google Calender and email can compete with MSFT. That is where is Google is making a move. The corporate email market is so big and is such a huge revenue generator, there is place for both Google and Exchange and Lotus Notes and may be yet another player. If Google corners anywhere between 20% to 33% of the corporate email market, it can outfox MSFT. If the next upgrade of Vista is not compatible with Gmail's corporate clients, they would even consider not upgrading. Already there is some reluctance in the marketplace to upgrade and people are getting upgrade-weary. If the OS upgrade forcing Office grade cycle gets broken, and if some corporations demand true interoperability instead of settling for MSFT compatibility, cracks will develop in MSFT's dominance. But it is all well into the future. Might take 5 years for this to happen.

Re:This is news?

[zappepcs]

Yes, this time it might be news, if you consider this: Mr Ozzie might be recognizing something, that brand recognition and locking consumers and PC manufacturers into your product is not enough. You *ALSO* have to be a company that people *LIKE*. (note the Mac and PC ad campaign among other things)

No matter how much you make or how much market share you have, you will eventually lose it if consumers don't like you or your new products. There will always be a "new kid in town" that will take center stage.

If MS had a good reputation and were a company that people liked on a level par with their market share, they would have nothing to worry about from Google, Mac, iPods, or anyone else. The trouble is that they don't have what they really need to grow profits against "the new kids in town" anymore, or so it seems.

Re:Moo

[hey!]

Except for one thing. Google (and Apple) are adept at something Microsoft is terrible at: making products consumers want to use.

Microsoft's strength has always been sellign to people who buy technology for other people to use. The only success they've had seling to consumers is the XBox. I'm not a gamer, so I wouldn't know why that would be, but I'd guess it has something to do with the importance of developers to game consoles. In a sense, it's just another platform to sell. If that is true, then consumers aren't buying the XBox for an XBox experience, but to experience games written by third parties.

The question is whether they can crack the corporate market on the basis of their bottom up appeal. I think they can, because they have credibilty with IT departments because just about every IT guy is a regular user of one or more Google services.

Next "home work" for Google

[bogaboga]

My suggestion to Google is to take multimedia its next "home work." Why not find a way to popularize open video and audio formats like ogg? As an example, the popular Google summer of code would have a project specifically geared to creating plug-ins that enable windows based multimedia players play ogg based formats.

Next, it then becomes our burden to make sure we wean ourselves off Microsoft's formats an to popularize this move.

Re:Waking Dream?

[canuck57]

(It's not even like they have to jump ship into OSS - Google's technology by and large is closed source, they just play ball better)

But built on open source Linux is it not? Google proves Linux can and does scale well.

Re:Always too little too late

[nuzak]

> Microsoft hasn't been innovating for years

Microsoft Research innovates like crazy. It's just rare that anything ever escapes alive and in recognizable form from MSR.

Hell, what has Linux innovated lately? Desktops on spinning cubes?

Why play fair when you don't have to?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

He said Microsoft plans to do more than simply follow Google's lead

...they plan to also leverage their monopoly.

Re:Moo (you missed "appropiating")

[apodyopsis]

The last stage of your apt introduction is the bit where Microsoft appropiate the technology as their own having removed the original innovator.

They remove the original innovator by a number of means: outright purchase and asset strip (stacker?), use their monopoly (netscape, firewalls, antivirus), FuD (linux - thats not working so well for them)... Have I missed any?

But once the original innovator is gone they can claim it as their own. And force us to use their cack-handed implementation in (to paraphrase the parent) "an annoying format". And what is worse, we let them.

Fume. Froth. Soapbox.

Re:Moo

[Zantetsuken]

yes but how many average joe's that can barely use Windows are going to know how to use latex, even know what it is, or even know what Linux is?

Re:Always too little too late

[notaprguy]

I'm sorry but what "rich content" does Google provide? Google is the yellow pages so I guess if you consider advertising "rich content" then your statement is accuraet. If you think that Google isn't motivated by financial interests then you're a very scary type of pollyanna. Also, if I were the paranoid type (which I'm not) I'd be way more scared of Google than I am of Microsoft. Google knows who you are, what you do on the Internet, who you conduct transactions with, who you send email to (if you use Gmail) etc etc.

Re:Always too little too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone want to try listing some real innovations?

Any list that includes 'welcomes piracy' as an innovation isn't worth the pixels you're reading it on.

No it's not

[WingedEarth]

Microsoft doesn't appear to be anywhere close to woken up. When was the last time Microsoft actually offered something new, rather than copying other people?

Re:Moo

[RyoShin]

That's what I thought when I read the synopsis. Microsoft isn't waking up, it's just working harder to play catch up.

On another forum I go to, someone has as their signature (roughly) "IE7- a 7th generation browser in a world of 8th gen browsers", and it's true. Microsoft didn't include tabs in their browser until FireFox and Opera had already been doing it for a while.

As Linux becomes a more viable OS, especially if Google's new apps take off, Microsoft is going to find itself more and more strained as it offers less and less innovation and improvements- the leap from Win98 to Win2K was quite a large one, the leap from 2K to XP less, and XP to Vista even less than that.

Re:Always too little too late

[Paul Bristow]

How about (for free):

a single OS that scales from tiny embedded systems up to supercomputers
many CPU architectures supported
pluggable filesystem support
pluggable scheduler support
ALSA - a decent multi-interface audio system
Low-latency support for media
Useable kernel level Software RAID
Oh and a Unix compatible system that replaced things costing $1000s back in the mid 90's.
affordable NAT
affordable firewalling

There's probably more, and some of these things appeared elsewhere first, but Linux got them deployed widely.

Microsoft is NOT an Internet company

[ScaredOfTheMan]

I don't mean to point out the obvious but MS is not an Internet company (even with OZ's help). They are OS and standalone application developers...who are able to use TCP and UDP in their products but certainly do not have the corp. balls to do something really innovative to get them noticed on the net.

The reason they are getting their @ss handed to them this time around (in search, social networking etc), is they can't bend the will of users to use their sub par products like in days gone by. No more proprietary formats or files, they really have to compete if they want to win, and to compete means take risks...and its for that reason that they will not win.

They got lots money...and a nice chunk of the desktop market...but that's not as important as it used to be. One final example, flash video basically demolished wmv as the defacto standard of video sharing overnight. First it was hardware abstraction...now its OS abstraction...and then what will MS do?

Re:This is news?

[truthsearch]

That thing ever gonna move from beta?

What's going to change when it "moves" from beta? At this point isn't it merely semantics? It's just a way for Google to say it's not officially supported (and maybe save a little money).

Re:Moo

[joshetc]

I've used all 3 major engines (Yahoo!, MSN, and Google) several times. Here is what I found:

Yahoo -> tons of annoying ads
MSN -> tons of annoying ads
Google -> a few text based ads

To me it really doesn't even matter who has the "better" search engine.

Re:Always too little too late

[WhiteWolf666]

Well, as other posters have said, Linux is just an OS kernel, not a distribution; having said that, there is a great deal of innovation going on in the open source world.

Linux:
1. User-space file systems. FUSE. This stuff is neat. Linux supports a panoply of filesystems that Windows users can only dream of, and a lot of these are worlds and worlds ahead of Windows stuff. Take a look at FunionFS, and Wayback FS.
2. Abstract, granular CPU and I/O prioritization and scheduling. Linux can be realtime in ways that NT can only dream of; which is impressive considering the scale of Linux.
3. LinuxBIOS. Anyone stuck an NT kernel into Motherboard firmware? No? Why not?
4. KVM. Linux kernel virtualization. Microsoft is talking about duplicating this for the NEXT version of NT.
5. A fully relocatable kernel. New in 2.6.20
6. How about a native IPv6 stack? Linux did it first.
7. How about boot time switching between 64-bit and 32-bit, or ACPI and noACPI? How about probing/autoloading of modules on boot? How about all possible drivers being installed, all the time, even ATI and NVIDIA's closed-source drivers now, using the Novell KMP system?
8. POSIX compliance (uncertified), AND Win32 compliance (uncertified). First OS to do this.
9. Support/scaling for an unlimited number of processors?
10. How about a flat memory model (4GB/4GB split), even on 32-bit?
11. Don't forget about ALSA. Wanna change how your sound is mixed, in userspace? No problem. Wanna reroute your mid-rear-left speaker to your record slot? No problem. Want 3D sound in older applications? OpenAL is there for you (unlike DirectSound in Vista). Here's a list of ALSA plugins, all of which are utilized in userspace: http://alsa.opensrc.org/ALSA_plugins [opensrc.org] .
12. Vast improvements in Kernel security all the time. Things like selinux, and AppArmor (AppArmor is really cool stuff) are worlds beyond UAC and group policy.

And that's just the OSS Linux kernel. Wanna talk about other subsystems?
CUPS versus Windows printing?
1. Autodiscovery of local subnet printers? Not possible in Windows, even Vista.
2. End to end Postscript printing, even on $15 crapprinters?
3. Out of box support for IPP, CUPS, LPR, SMB, and other kind of printing system you can dream of.
No matter how you slice, CUPS is worlds away from Windows printing. Never, ever have to deal with printer drivers as you move from network to network; this is a dream avaliable for years in the CUPS world.

X? Xorg is a thing of beauty.
1. Full network transparency (2D/3D). Not avaliable in Windows. Best of breed network performance using NX.
2. A fully modular windowing system. Remove or add components at will. No Internet Explorer required.
3. Extremely high performance, with decades of support for both 2D and 3D operations.
4. The sky's the limit in terms of scalability. 1 monitor? 4 monitors? 64 monitors spread across 12 systems? No problemo.
5. Xgl is the beginnings of a pure 3D windowing system with legacy support. Xegl is the future of this pure 3D windowing system, at performance levels that put Aero's hybrid 2D/3D setup to shame.
6. Yes, spinning cubes. And a whole lot more eye candy. On a whole lot less hardware than Aero requires. Geforce 5200 mobile with 32 MB of RAM? No problem.

GUIs?
I don't know much about Gnome, as I'm a KDE guy, but:
1. KIO-slaves. ftp:// [ftp] ? of course. bzip2:// ? torrent:// ? fish:// (this one is amazing, directory browsing over plain SSH). beagled:// ? how about man:// or programs:// ? how about klik:// ? KIO-slaves are one of the coolest features in GUIs out there, hands down.
2. Kparts. Click on a PDF url, and you get KPDF in your Konqueror window. Click on a DOC url, and you get Kword in your Window. Click on an RPM, and you get either YaST2 (for SuSE), or KPackage. And all of these are user configurable, of course, on a user-by-user basis. This is something that neither OS X or Windows have worked out correctly.