Gates Successor Says Microsoft Laid Foundation for Google

thefickler writes "According to Bill Gates' successor Craig Mundie, there would have been no Google without Microsoft. 'I mean, the fact is: Google's existence and success required Microsoft to have been successful previously to create the platform that allowed them to go on and connect people to their search servers. Now, Microsoft's business is not to control the platform per se, but in fact to allow it to be exploited by the world's developers. The fact that we have it out there gives us a good business, but in some ways it doesn't give us an advantage over any of the other developers in terms of being able to utilize it.' This comment comes from a lengthy interview between Mundie and APC magazine, which talks with the newly installed strategy and R&D head. Other interesting topics discussed include the future of Microsoft and Windows, OOXML, and and the 'rise of Linux' on the desktop."

Hardly...

[techmuse]

The "platform" that Goooooogle uses was not developed by Microsoft. The Internet originated with DARPA. Other companies developed the routing and networking infrastructure. The Web originated at CERN, on a NeXT machine. Web browsing was common on Unix machines long before it was available or easily usable on Windows machines. Windows didn't even support TCP/IP natively when the browser was developed. The web server also originated at CERN, although the first popular one (NCSA HTTPD) originated at UIUC's National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Microsoft was late to the game, late to recognize the usefulness or importance of the Internet, attempted on a number of occasions to try to gain control of the Internet as a platform, and has done little or nothing to advance the Internet on its own (except for adding extensions to standards that would lock people into its own platform.)

Oh...and Goooooogle runs on Linux.

Re:What's he smoking?

[stox]

I don't think you want to smoke what he is smoking. It obviously kills a lot of brain cells. I guess he kept a vintage stash of PCP from the late 1970's.

Re:Electricity

[mlwmohawk]

Small point, no one invented electricity, it's nature was discovered, and not by Benjamin Franklin.

without NeXT there'd be no web

[jsepeta]

without NeXT there'd be no intertube-web-information-highway thingamajig.
without PARC there'd be no mouse

google wouldn't work without either of these companies, but they'd probably do just fine if Microsoft would go under.

Re:Translation

[DaveWick79]

Yes, I just looked it up and Terraserver went online in June of 1998, Google opened it's doors in September of 1998.

Re:Translation - Google Earth

[benj_e]

Google Earth is not a Google developed product - they just bought the Keyhole viewer. And you can thank ESRI, MapInfo, Microstation, and others for developing that market.

Face it, Google copies others just like every other company copies others. The whole idea of any company being the One True Innovator is a marketing myth.

Re:Yeah - so?

[clubby]

MS didn't put support in place, Trumpet Winsock did. I remember that *distinctly.*

Re:Yeah - so?

[MightyMartian]

I was using a SLIP connection to access the Internet from Linux and OS/2 before Windows 95 came along. Both these operating systems ran on PCs, so no esoteric monster hardware was required. Yes, there were TCP/IP stacks from Windows (Trumpet being the most well known, not to mention the Windows for Workgroups TCP/IP stack), but what we're talking about here is Microsoft's general acknowledgement late in the development of Chicago that the Internet was *already* something. IBM had already figured that out, and had put a fully functional set of TCP/IP tools; email, web, gopher, FTP and telnet into OS/2 Warp. Microsoft was, in fact, the late-comer to the game, something they acknowledged to some degree at the time.

I really do think Microsoft is taking far too much credit here.

No, you don't ignore history

[Moraelin]

Don't ignore history; DOS and Windows were the large majority of the market even then. Its doubtful anyone would jump from PC to some propritary and more expensive hardware just to get on the internet. At that point, businesses still didn't know what quite to do with it, and consumers were (likely) draw to the sex sites.

No offense, but please take your own advice and don't ignore history. At the time:

1. There was nothing magical about DOS. It just happened to be the OS that IBM selected for their computer, and their computer turned out to be insanely popular. People didn't give a fuck about the OS as such, it was just the thing that came with their PC. If Microsoft hadn't existed, IBM maybe would have made a better offer for CP/M or maybe would have written their own micro-OS.

There was nothing revolutionary about DOS. It was a clone of CP/M. And having worked with both MS DOS and CP/M, I can tell you they were barely program loaders and the most primitive filesystem imaginable (though each in its own way.) Even you could have written your own DOS, if you wanted to, and so could IBM. But again, IBM wouldn't really have had to: CP/M was already insanely popular on 8 bit micros, so it would have been a no-brainer to license it instead.

2. Windows was nothing special either. OS/2 had a graphical interface too, and so did GEM and half a dozen other stuff. MS Windows may have been the most popular graphical interface at the time, but it wasn't the only one by far. The idea that without MS Windows you'd have had to buy some uber-expensive hardware instead, is just absurd. Without MS, you would have gotten GEM or any of the other GUIs instead.

Even skipping past the fact that someone would have filled the void eventually anyway, the fact is: they wouldn't have had to, because there was no void to start with. Alternatives already existed.

Now we can debate whether Windows was the best, and it certainly was the most popular. But thinking that without MS you wouldn't have had a graphical browser on the PC, is just absurd.

3. The IBM PC itself, again, was nothing fundamentally special. There were _plenty_ of other computers competing for the market at the time. Another one would have filled the void.

Everyone rants and raves about how MS brought us finally to $300 computers, but seem to ommit that we had been there before already. E.g., my first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000, a.k.a., ZX-81, which cost IIRC 60$. Now ok, a ZX-81 couldn't exactly run a graphical browser, but a lot of others could. I see no reason why a Sinclair QL or Amiga couldn't have evolved to fill the niche if the PC didn't exist.

Basically the PC may have been the best bang/buck, but it wasn't the only offering by far. It also wasn't the cheapest.

So basically the assertion that without a PC surely you'd have ended up with something much more expensive to go online, is flawed. We don't know at what price the market would have stabilized, if the PC hadn't pushed everyone else out of the market.

4. You'd be surprised how much of the PC's evolution had _nothing_ to do with MS. It was wildly cloned because IBM allowed anyone to clone it, as long as they paid the royalties for the BIOS. Then Compaq did a clean room reverse-engineering and that was the beginning of PCs which aren't encumbered even by that. And so on.

There were a myriad of factors that combined to make the PC ubiquitous, most of which had nothing to do with MS. Hearing that MS single-handedly brought computing to the masses is nothing but revisionism of ludicrious proportions. While they might have had _some_ of the merit, they were just one among hundreds of companies which contributed to the phenomenon.

Heck, even with their DOS, at some point IBM got sick and tired of MS's 32 MB partition limit, so they bought DOS from MS, wrote a better filesystem and sold it back to MS. The intermediate IBM version was IBM DOS 4.0. Or for Windows a lot of the work was paid for b

Re:Yeah - so?

[Anonymous Coward]

The claim that without Microsoft the Internet would still be USENET and Gopher is pretty pathetically off-base, actually, considering that the first nodes on the World Wide Web were NeXT machines (such as info.cern.ch).

Re:Yeah - so?

[hopeless case]

Are you saying without Newton, Calculus would have been seriously delayed?

Assuming you are...

Leibnitz actually published his work on calculus before Newton published his.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz_and_Newton_calculus_controversy [wikipedia.org]

Re:Yeah - so?

[k8to]

That was the joke.

Give Al Gore a break.

[PaulGaskin]

Microsoft is full of crap, as usual. Al Gore never claimed he invented the internet. It's so frustrating the way people paraphrase rather than quoting just to make a headline. It was the work of our corporate-owned media who was determined to make Gore look stupid in order to pave the way for that election thief and traitor who currently occupies the Oval Office. Al Gore for president!

Re:What's he smoking?

[WhyDoYouWantToKnow]

I don't believe that only MS, IBM and Intel could have provided a popular standard platform that made the web practical from a business perspective, but somebody had to. Perhaps it could have been Apple instead, but it certainly wouldn't have been UNIX or it's clones.

Please tell me I miss read that and you didn't just suggest that MS, IBM and Intel developed TCP/IP.

Aside from that point of contention, I would think that the Dept of Defense choosing TCP/IP as their standard for all military computer networking had more to do with TCP/IP's use as a standard than anything MS, IBM and Intel did.

Re:I think Mundie has a point

[tbannist]

No, I'm afraid not. He's shameless agrandizing the company he helms because it's good for business to do so. He has no knowledge of the history of computing and doesn't care to learn it either. As far as he's concerned everything good is a result of Microsoft's hard work. Learning more about the actual history would only make it harder for him to say the things stuff like this with a straight face.

Re:Give Al Gore a break.

[Kymermosst]

Al Gore never claimed he invented the internet.

No, what he said, exactly, was:

During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the internet.

While it doesn't actually say "I created the internet," it's a phrase that is intended to imply to the average idiot that he did, in fact, create the internet.

Yes, he took plenty of "information superhighway" initiatives. Thanks to some of those initiatives, we have the commercialized internet. However, the internet existed before that - not necessarily funded by any of his initiatives and certainly not because of much legwork done by him.

It was a disingenuous statement and it'd be nice if more politicians were held accountable for that type of spin.