TropicalCoder writes "Ray Ozzie says that Google Wave is 'anti-Web,' by which he seems to mean that it is too complex for its own good. In the video he complains about its complexity in relation to Microsoft's Live Mesh: 'If you have something, that by its very nature is very complex, with many goals... then you need open source to have many instances of it because nobody will be able to do an independent implementation of it.' That's its weakness to Ozzie, apparently — that this complexity that can only be overcome by open source. While he heaps high praise on the Google team that came up with this, he feels that the advantage of Microsoft's approach is that '...by decomposing things to be simpler, you don't need open source.' The Register's author summarizes it like this: 'In a way, this is classic Microsoft meets what is emerging as classic Google. Microsoft gives you an integrated stack but all the moving parts are anchored on a single company's vision. Google frees you to work out the bits yourself, but you must rely on your own smarts or those of your chosen tools.'"
Calm down. The editor is our friend kdawson. When he choses to not troll directly he just choses some indirect form of trolling. Like putting out an obvious article of a MS employee praising their own products above the competition. Just to get this same reaction. Kdawson is just at work, doing what he does best: trolling.
Talk about being anti-web. The wave google tool is something you can use on the web. The Microsoft tool is something you have to download and then install before you can even start using. The wave google tool can be used with anyone with an email address. And the Microsoft tool can be used only with other people if those other people registered, downloaded, and installed their software. Yeah, I really wonder who's anti-web now.
I've found Microsoft's Live Mesh to be an idea in search of an application... whereas Google's product seems more the reverse, an application in search of an idea. I prefer the later. But also, I have no idea what Live Mesh is for. I don't know what the thing is supposed to do.
Talk about being anti-web. The wave google tool is something you can use on the web. The Microsoft tool is something you have to download and then install before you can even start using.
Doesn't that make firefox anti-web?
Absolutely. Firefox should have been implemented as an activeX plugin.
No, wait. DHTML and javascript. And written to only run in IE6.
"Talk about being anti-web. The wave google tool is something you can use on the web. The Microsoft tool is something you have to download and then install before you can even start using." Doesn't that make firefox anti-web?
Sure, if you include only a snippet of what I said, carefully excluding the rest, then I guess you could have a point. That being said, even if I accept your straw-man, at least if I download Firefox, and if my mom downloads IE, in most cases (barring a few exceptions), we'll be able to browse the same web pages.
So I was wondering who Ray Ozzie is, and how about that, he's a software architect for Microsoft. Of course he's going to praise Microsoft's software, no? Summery seems a little bias, imo.
You're missing some other details about who Ray Ozzie is - he was the creator of Lotus Notes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie [wikipedia.org]
He definitely has some bias towards Microsoft though.
So I was wondering who Ray Ozzie is, and how about that, he's a software architect for Microsoft.
Ray Ozzie [wikipedia.org] is the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft. He replaced Bill Gates as the person who drives Microsoft's technological decisions.
Live Mesh is Ray's brainchild. Why is it important to listen to what Ray says? Because he directs the future of Microsoft's development in the space. He controls billions of Microsoft dollars. The point is that he's not some random Microsoft shill - he's the guy in charge.
I have a hard time being sure whether it's biased. Personally, I read that Google Wave is the "Anti-Web" and I thought, "Sounds cool. Does that mean it fixes all the dumb stuff about the web? Or... wait, is 'anti-web' a bad thing?"
I read, "If you have something, that by its very nature is very complex, with many goals... then you need open source to have many instances of it because nobody will be able to do an independent implementation of it," and I thought, "Yeah, isn't open source awesome? It can accomplish things that are really too complex for a proprietary vendor, but it can still work out because lots of different people can work together on the solution!" And then I thought, "Er... wait, or is that supposed to be a bad thing?"
I couldn't really tell if it was praise or criticism until I looked up who Ray Ozzie was, and then I knew it was supposed to be criticism. To my ears, that Microsoft's approach doesn't require things to be open source really only sounds like an advantage for Microsoft, not for the users or developers who might be interested in the products.
The basic problem these days is that you have many people who want to have access to a shared document. The solution that Microsoft was pursuing was good, and attempted to fit the RSS model blogs use to push content. But in the end you still have many copies of documents, and you're always trying to keep changes synced across them. This approach breaks down when you have multiple sources of change... conflict resolution will always jump up to bite you.
Google Wave is a brilliant leapfrog over this problem, at the cost of some complexity. They made engineering choices that so far seem to be very pragmatic and practical... and if you don't like them you could always build your own. They actually distribute the changes to all observers, using OT (Operational Transforms) to keep everything synchronized. As a benefit, you can work on only the changes to a document, instead of having to re-scan the whole thing every time something changes, to attempt to work backwards to figure out the changes.
The ambition of Google's approach is backed up with a brilliant exploration of the solution space, and a very good choice of models, both in terms of the open source approach, in their openness with documentation, etc... and their choice of federation as a first class part of the model.
The latest analogy that I came up with is one of a Jet Engine.... instead of working on one charge of fuel/air at a time (one document)... it operates on a stream of fuel and air.... which allows for higher performance (at the cost of some fuel efficiency).
We don't care as much about the computational cycles as we do all the human time this saves by tracking all the changes, and who made them.
That's not the issue at hand here. The site linked from the summary, Live Mesh (Beta), supports sharing and discussing documents [mesh.com]. It does not do it in real-time, but, realistically, the real-time part of Google Wave's colloborative document editing is not that important.
The real issues are design and openness. I am a bit confused about where Ray Ozzie is coming from: I think he means that the problem with Google Wave is that it is too simple and web-like, not that it is too complex. That is, Google Wave has a lot of potiential, but much of that potiential depends on people writing gadgets/add-ons for it, as opposed to its features being limited to those Google/Microsoft can think up but already layed out in a structured way. The same issue is often referenced as one of the web's greatest strengths -- and weaknesses.
There is another large issue related to openness: privacy. With Google Wave, you can get all of the features running it on your own server, fully controling the software and hardware. Live Mesh is just yet another web service like Dropbox, etc. which depends on Microsoft's Live Mesh servers. Then again, Microsoft may plan on making it part of Windows Server, which gets rid of the privacy issue.
I think the web has shown quite clearly that leaving a protocol open allows for wide-ranged, unexpected innovations to be based on it. Google has shown off some of its ideas on what Wave is useful for. The Wave groups and various blogs have plenty more. Most likely, if Wave actually catches on, at least some of the common/mainstream uses 5 years from now will bare only passing resemblance to the ideas being thrown around today.
The solution that Microsoft was pursuing was good, and attempted to fit the RSS model blogs use to push content
I think that FeedSync is great...if you think of it as a "improved RSS/Atom", but nothing more. I mean, using it as synchronization protocol for any kind of data flowing to/from the cloud looks stupid.
And this whole synchronization thing seems to be oriented, in the Microsoft side, to sync data between storage devices and computers. Google however seems want put most of the data in their servers. Just "upload" them one time, and the rest of the time access and share that data with the browser. No need to sync - most of the time. Microsoft is all focused in building a "synchronization protocol" that is not really going to be neccesary if we move all/most of our data to the cloud...
There are already good solutions to this problem: it is called revision control and the Subversion system is a high-quality open source solution to most common version control / sharing scenarios. Visual Source Safe wishes that it could be as good as Subversion, but the open source crowd beat them to it.
That misses why Google Docs was actually popular. If two people edit the same document at once, using a revision control scheme, then there's a significant potential of a merge conflict or of a nasty "someone else has the lock on this document" message, both of which are a usability nightmare if your users are non-technical -- the user is stopped in their tracks, gives up, and goes away. Google Docs does use a revision control method behind the scenes (google-diff-match-patch), but because the commits and updates are happening automatically every 30 seconds, the changes are kept very small and the chance of a merge conflict is very much lower. To show just how simple it is technically, Docwit [sourceforge.net] is a very small hobby open source project that ties TinyMCE to google-diff-match-patch to do the same thing, but because you can run your own server you don't have to give Google your data.
Google Wave essentially just goes "Hmm, why don't we shrink the update period even further, and (like SubEthaEdit, and also quite like a few other projects that have involved working on XML documents remotely) send operational changes when they happen rather than polling every 30 seconds?". The change size gets even smaller, and with it the chances of having to show a user a "merge conflict" or "lock conflict" scary box are also reduced.
You see, it turns out not many people use Google Docs for "proper" documents (of the corporate kind) but a heck of a lot use it for collaborative note taking, as a cheap-and-easy wiki, and for lots of other "low-fuss" tasks.
But in the end you still have many copies of documents, and you're always trying to keep changes synced across them. This approach breaks down when you have multiple sources of change... conflict resolution will always jump up to bite you.
There are already good solutions to this problem: it is called revision control [wikipedia.org] and the Subversion [tigris.org] system is a high-quality open source solution to most common version control / sharing scenarios. Visual Source Safe wishes that it could be as good as Subversion, but the open source crowd beat them to it.
The problem with generic revision control systems is that rich document formats like odf and ms doc are not inherently mergeable without knowledge of file formats. Some tools (mercurial [selenic.com] being one) can invoke external merge tools which in theory allow users to manually merge documents. But it never works as well as plain text source code.
This will become a truism in future times: software is the expression of a social intelligence and the more people are involved, the better that works. FOSS is simply better at solving complex problems (like "how to build an operating system") than closed source development.
Ironically, while Google depends on FOSS for its most innovative attacks on Microsoft (Android, for example, which has leapt over WinCE and Symbian with what appears little effort), Google keeps its most valuable technology (searching) completely closed.
Thus, one can conclude that this is also Google's long term weakness. Microsoft: if you want to beat Google, find a way to develop a completely open search ranking system.
Microsoft: if you want to beat Google, find a way to develop a completely open search ranking system.
That would be the craziest day ever. I wonder if it would come on the heels of Rush Limbaugh touting the virtues of President Obama and the RIAA unilaterally dropping all of its pending litigation and issuing a formal apology to those it has sued.
Microsoft: if you want to beat Google, find a way to develop a completely open search ranking system.
Ballmer: What's that? You need a chair flung at your head? I could have sworn you just said something about "open skull". I'll fucking kill you and your little Google too!
"Microsoft: if you want to beat Google, find a way to develop a completely open search ranking system."
And this to me is the most delicious irony in this stinky stew. I think MS is perfectly capable of developing such a thing, but they will invariably find a way to shoot themselves in the foot. I remember hearing a while back that searching for Linux with the MS search engine produced thousands of results while searching the same term on Google produced tens of millions of hits. Once you've demonstr
I remember hearing a while back that searching for Linux with the MS search engine produced thousands of results while searching the same term on Google produced tens of millions of hits.
If you put linux into the search box in Bing (without pressing anything), it suggests things like "microsoft linux", "linux vista".
As the guy who designed Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie has no credit with me about complaining about complexity. What is Lotus Notes? Is it a database? Email system? Application development platform? How about all that and more! A good friend of mine was a Lotus Notes developer back in the day said "Lotus Notes is everything you want and need from now to the end of time, and it's all available to you right now."
Let me quote what Joel On Software wrote [joelonsoftware.com] about Ozzie and all this "Mesh" thing:
And now Ray Ozzie's big achievement arrives and what is it? (drumroll...) Microsoft Live Mesh. The future of everything. Microsoft is "moving into the cloud."
What's Microsoft Live Mesh?
Hmm, let's see.
"Imagine all your devices--PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones--working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about."
Wait a minute. Something smells fishy here. Isn't that exactly what Hailstorm was supposed to be? I smell an architecture astronaut.
And what is this Windows Live Mesh?
It's a way to synchronize files.
Jeez, we've had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I'm sorry. It seems like it should be. But it's not.
But Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That's just the sample app. It's a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop. And synchronizing files is supposed to be, like, the equivalent of Microsoft Write on Windows 1.0.
It's Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can't stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.
And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn't stop him.
It is a Database centric application development platform. You don't say that it is hard to understand what an OS is if it comes with an email application, or a web browser do you? Lotus Notes/Domino is EXTREMELY simple to develop on and use. It's biggest problem is that because it is and has been an Enterprise environment first all of the features that it pioneered got renamed and the look changed a little when competitors finally got around to trying to implement what Notes had been doing for years. Since the competitors were desktop apps, most people got their first taste of these features with MS or their like, and assumed that Notes was 'non-standard'.
The other problem Notes has is that it is so simple that companies frequently assign the first user to touch it as a developer. I'm not saying that it is impossible that the Kelly Girl Temp that is in your office this week is a great developer. I'm just say that on average, the code they tend not to be. So, a lot of companies have bad apps written by people who simply are not developers.
Notes 6.5.1 (the last version I have extensive experience with) did not come out a decade ago. It came out in 2004, and it a gigantic piece of crap. The only thing good I can say about it is that it *finally* worked correctly on NT with multiple users-- only 10 full years after every other piece of software on Earth did!
Are you really complaining that a version of software a over a decade out of date was unstable? If your apps were flimsy, you should have talked to your developers. The Domino system is and has been for a long time a very robust system.
Dude, reality check:
IBM sells Lotus Domino/Notes as an email system, "groupware" if you want to use that term. Look: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/ [ibm.com] Right there on the website, it says the top two features are Email and Calendaring.
Email and Calendaring. Lotus Notes may work for many tasks, but two tasks is *does not* work for is Email and Calendaring. Not even close. Hell, I had to reset Palms at my workplace 3 times a week when Notes would reliably bug-out create appointments that ended before they began-- which of course confused the poor Palm software to no end.
The amount of lost data due to Notes' failure of a UI is legendary. Deleting a copy of an email filed into a folder *also* deleted any other copy in any other folder. Amazingly retarded design. Notes didn't open attachments in the Temp folder as Read Only, so it encouraged users to edit them and save their changes. While, at the same time, it was super-aggressive about cleaning up the Temp folder. I can't even guess at how many documents were lost that way by poor, understandably confused, users.
Yes, Lotus Notes can do all that and a bag of crap, but it's sold as groupware and that is how it shall be judged. I'd go as far as saying that I don't even give a shit what else it can do: it's sold as groupware, and it *sucks* as groupware, and thus it's a failure of a product. (It also costs twice as much per-seat as Outlook, for a far inferior product.)
The anti-Notes trolls always crack me up. They basically say "I once saw a badly implemented application in Notes a decade ago, and it didn't compare to applications that are being written today." It makes about as much sense as complaining about Windows because you didn't like WindowsME.
Oh please. Compare Notes 6.5.1 with Outlook 2003. NIGHT AND DAY. (Notes being "night.")
Here's what I'll acknowledge: there is a certain subclass of human being, you included among them, that are not only blind to Notes' downsides, but actually are huge fans of the program. I won't attempt to change your mind, because I know from experience that your brainwashing is total and complete. But I'd really appreciate it if you didn't just dismiss all criticism of Notes out-of-hand.
The thing that gets me is, Lotus Notes was basically doing the same thing as Google Wave years ago. Distributed persistent documents. A brilliant idea, flawed in execution (and the fact that it wasn't open source so you only had one company to get it from, so it got locked into its own ghetto).
Wave is another attempt at the concept, hopefully learning a few things and doing it simpler, but... surely Roy Ozzie of all people should see the similarities.
The clever bit is that they made a bunch of disparate applications into views of one model. email=RSS=blog=IRC=USENET=document. Yourserver+push+threads+chat+categories+changelogs
The part where they brought up a client that looks like mail(or maybe pine) was the best bit.
In other News, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer issued a joint statement saying "in their independent opinion as leading figures in the software industry, Live Mesh kicks Wave's ass."
Where in Google's presentation did they say that implementations had to all be open source? They simply said they'd supply some of their own code and the documentation for the protocols to allow other people to implement their solutions. They never said all the other people had to open source their versions.
ray ozzie tells the world that we should take wave seriously
if ray ozzie had ignored wave, then he would have implicitly communicated it would be safe for everyone else to ignore wave
by throwing a hissy fit over wave, ray ozzie is telling all of us that wave has real potential
google should cut ray ozzie a check for the free PR and advertising
when will people learn that there is no such thing as bad press? all exposure, positive or negative, is good exposure. that's why attempts at censorship often backfire (see: streisand effect)
An ajax web app that tries to ape a simple desktop app is built with:
HTTP HTML CSS XML SQL JavaScript PHP/Python/Ruby/other scripting language
That's 7 different text-based (aka "simple") languages/syntaxes a developer has to learn just to be able just to get the same basic functionality as a simple desktop application. The current system as it is isn't simple.
I was showing a Linux user Live Mesh today - and I've got to say it's shaping up to be a really impressive 'something'. Not quite sure what it is, but it's impressive. 5 gig syncing across my desktop PC, laptop, home server, work PC, and mobile phone. So it's a cloud storage thingy, I hear you cry. Ah ha, but it also has built-in remote desktop. And you can invite other people to have access to your remotely shared files.
So... it's syncing cloud storage, and a remote control system thrown in. Maybe I don't get its place in the Universe, but there's no denying the technology works well.
This is me commenting on the technology I know about - not used Wave, but it read as a heck of a technology, on paper. I'd be very interested to get my hands on it.
This allows you to share a document and make multiple simultaneous changes, providing a structure to do so all the way up and down... this framework gives you a standard way to do things, that can then be expanded upon in a whole new set of ways.
Yes... this stuff could be done in a web forum... just like you could program everything in assembler... but it's more efficient in many ways to spend a little CPU time to make up for hours of developer time.
This framework will allow others to reach much, much farther and do things you can't even imagine doing via php/javascript.
If you just want to run a standalone web forum, then Google Wave may not offer much more than a ajax php forum. And if you just want email, then SMTP+IMAP/POP is surely good enough.
The power of Google Wave comes from the unification of various communication and collaboration paradigms, it's federated nature, it's extensibility and it's open-standard and web-centric approach. In the old model if I want to participate in a forum I'll have to register on the web, go back to my outlook to get the verification email, and then go back to web. I'll also have to subscribe to email alerts for new posts, then go back to the web to reply. All these context switching is totally unnecessary and can be frustrating when you have say 10 different web forums, 5 social networks, 3 photo sharing sites, and 2 IM networks and 1 blog. And there is no practical way to for me to search and browse through my entire communication history in one place.
Yes, Google Wave does not immediately offer any new features, but it does simplify many of those things. It is actually very similar to e-mail as it is a decentralized system for storing and transmitting data, except it is designed to be real-time, support threading/discussions easily, and embed various types of applications and rich data easily. This essientially raises an e-mail/IM medium such that it can be used instead of web for simple uses. IM is not suitable because, unlike e-mail and Wave, it does n
"Well I am fully vested and have just cashed out. I must say we suck, I mean we are STILL playing catchup on the web and can't put together a clean OS architecture. In fact, The only was we could improve is if you all went to goggle and we had to really think about what we do to compete. Well, good night, and Steve? I bolted the chairs down."
He's right as far as he goes, it's just that he doesn't go far enough. Google tends to open up their APIs and say to the developer world "Go play with this", Microsoft chooses not to take that risk (and yeah, it is a risk) and keeps a tighter lid on their software. It is absolutely true that this gives Microsoft more control over their brand image and software.
Where he stops short, however, is not looking at the final results. He just doesn't get that open source and open APIs work. Letting the develope
When Gmail first launched, they did not support POP3 or IMAP. (no other web provider did either, for that matter) Today, they do.
Because this will be an open protocol (GWFP on XMPP), somebody will eventually develop a client protocol, or (preferably) extend the federated protocol to the client level. If it's any good, Google will eventually implement it. Right now, Google is stuck on Web 2.0 and HTML 5. (and cloud computing?) I think they can be broken free from that, it just takes some presure on a ca
I mean, it is distributed and decentralised, which is the antithesis of what the WWW is about.
What planet did you grow up on? The "World Wide Web" is comprised of a decentralized, distributed (worldwide) set of computers running web servers owned and controlled by myriad companies and individuals (more specifically, the web pages and hyperlinks). You seem to understand that there is a difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet, but cannot grasp that the "www" part of the equation is thoroughly distributed and decentralized?
Really? Wave allows multiple people to edit the same document at the same time, across company lines... AFIK, this is not anywhere on the radar at Microsoft.
Everybody seems to be forgetting that after Notes, Ray Ozzie invented Groove, which is now owned by Microsoft (which is currently in the process of integrating it with SharePoint).
What's this!? (Score:5, Funny)
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"...which bit sounded praisey?"
None of it, I distinctly heard him say "paisley".
Snooore (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Snooore (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I've found Microsoft's Live Mesh to be an idea in search of an application... whereas Google's product seems more the reverse, an application in search of an idea. I prefer the later. But also, I have no idea what Live Mesh is for. I don't know what the thing is supposed to do.
Re:Snooore (Score:5, Funny)
Absolutely. Firefox should have been implemented as an activeX plugin.
No, wait. DHTML and javascript. And written to only run in IE6.
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Re:Snooore (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, if you include only a snippet of what I said, carefully excluding the rest, then I guess you could have a point. That being said, even if I accept your straw-man, at least if I download Firefox, and if my mom downloads IE, in most cases (barring a few exceptions), we'll be able to browse the same web pages.
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Ray Ozzie (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ray Ozzie (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Ray Ozzie (Score:5, Informative)
and from your link:
A tad more than "some" I would imagine.
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Re:Ray Ozzie (Score:5, Funny)
who Ray Ozzie is - he was the creator of Lotus Notes.
For this crime alone, he should be punished extravagantly. Or at least, regarded with skepticism.
I'm not sayin' Outlook's much better, but still...
signed,
idontgno, current Lotus Notes sufferer^w user
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I'm not sayin' Outlook's much better, but still...
I will. It goes over better if you remind people that Outlook has no relation to Outlook Express.
*Chief* Software Architect (Score:4, Insightful)
So I was wondering who Ray Ozzie is, and how about that, he's a software architect for Microsoft.
Ray Ozzie [wikipedia.org] is the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft. He replaced Bill Gates as the person who drives Microsoft's technological decisions.
Live Mesh is Ray's brainchild. Why is it important to listen to what Ray says? Because he directs the future of Microsoft's development in the space. He controls billions of Microsoft dollars. The point is that he's not some random Microsoft shill - he's the guy in charge.
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Re:Ray Ozzie (Score:5, Interesting)
Summery seems a little bias, imo.
I have a hard time being sure whether it's biased. Personally, I read that Google Wave is the "Anti-Web" and I thought, "Sounds cool. Does that mean it fixes all the dumb stuff about the web? Or... wait, is 'anti-web' a bad thing?"
I read, "If you have something, that by its very nature is very complex, with many goals... then you need open source to have many instances of it because nobody will be able to do an independent implementation of it," and I thought, "Yeah, isn't open source awesome? It can accomplish things that are really too complex for a proprietary vendor, but it can still work out because lots of different people can work together on the solution!" And then I thought, "Er... wait, or is that supposed to be a bad thing?"
I couldn't really tell if it was praise or criticism until I looked up who Ray Ozzie was, and then I knew it was supposed to be criticism. To my ears, that Microsoft's approach doesn't require things to be open source really only sounds like an advantage for Microsoft, not for the users or developers who might be interested in the products.
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Google's quantum leap (Score:5, Informative)
The basic problem these days is that you have many people who want to have access to a shared document. The solution that Microsoft was pursuing was good, and attempted to fit the RSS model blogs use to push content. But in the end you still have many copies of documents, and you're always trying to keep changes synced across them. This approach breaks down when you have multiple sources of change... conflict resolution will always jump up to bite you.
Google Wave is a brilliant leapfrog over this problem, at the cost of some complexity. They made engineering choices that so far seem to be very pragmatic and practical... and if you don't like them you could always build your own. They actually distribute the changes to all observers, using OT (Operational Transforms) to keep everything synchronized. As a benefit, you can work on only the changes to a document, instead of having to re-scan the whole thing every time something changes, to attempt to work backwards to figure out the changes.
The ambition of Google's approach is backed up with a brilliant exploration of the solution space, and a very good choice of models, both in terms of the open source approach, in their openness with documentation, etc... and their choice of federation as a first class part of the model.
The latest analogy that I came up with is one of a Jet Engine.... instead of working on one charge of fuel/air at a time (one document)... it operates on a stream of fuel and air.... which allows for higher performance (at the cost of some fuel efficiency).
We don't care as much about the computational cycles as we do all the human time this saves by tracking all the changes, and who made them.
Bravo, Google... you've done it again!
Re:Google's quantum leap (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not the issue at hand here. The site linked from the summary, Live Mesh (Beta), supports sharing and discussing documents [mesh.com]. It does not do it in real-time, but, realistically, the real-time part of Google Wave's colloborative document editing is not that important.
The real issues are design and openness. I am a bit confused about where Ray Ozzie is coming from: I think he means that the problem with Google Wave is that it is too simple and web-like, not that it is too complex. That is, Google Wave has a lot of potiential, but much of that potiential depends on people writing gadgets/add-ons for it, as opposed to its features being limited to those Google/Microsoft can think up but already layed out in a structured way. The same issue is often referenced as one of the web's greatest strengths -- and weaknesses.
There is another large issue related to openness: privacy. With Google Wave, you can get all of the features running it on your own server, fully controling the software and hardware. Live Mesh is just yet another web service like Dropbox, etc. which depends on Microsoft's Live Mesh servers. Then again, Microsoft may plan on making it part of Windows Server, which gets rid of the privacy issue.
I think the web has shown quite clearly that leaving a protocol open allows for wide-ranged, unexpected innovations to be based on it. Google has shown off some of its ideas on what Wave is useful for. The Wave groups and various blogs have plenty more. Most likely, if Wave actually catches on, at least some of the common/mainstream uses 5 years from now will bare only passing resemblance to the ideas being thrown around today.
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Re:Google's quantum leap (Score:5, Funny)
The latest analogy that I came up with is one of a Jet Engine....
Your upstart "Jet Engine analogies" are putting trustworthy, hard-working American "Car Analogies" out of work!
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Re:Google's quantum leap (Score:4, Insightful)
The solution that Microsoft was pursuing was good, and attempted to fit the RSS model blogs use to push content
I think that FeedSync is great...if you think of it as a "improved RSS/Atom", but nothing more. I mean, using it as synchronization protocol for any kind of data flowing to/from the cloud looks stupid.
And this whole synchronization thing seems to be oriented, in the Microsoft side, to sync data between storage devices and computers. Google however seems want put most of the data in their servers. Just "upload" them one time, and the rest of the time access and share that data with the browser. No need to sync - most of the time. Microsoft is all focused in building a "synchronization protocol" that is not really going to be neccesary if we move all/most of our data to the cloud...
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Re:Google's quantum leap (Score:5, Insightful)
There are already good solutions to this problem: it is called revision control and the Subversion system is a high-quality open source solution to most common version control / sharing scenarios. Visual Source Safe wishes that it could be as good as Subversion, but the open source crowd beat them to it.
That misses why Google Docs was actually popular. If two people edit the same document at once, using a revision control scheme, then there's a significant potential of a merge conflict or of a nasty "someone else has the lock on this document" message, both of which are a usability nightmare if your users are non-technical -- the user is stopped in their tracks, gives up, and goes away. Google Docs does use a revision control method behind the scenes (google-diff-match-patch), but because the commits and updates are happening automatically every 30 seconds, the changes are kept very small and the chance of a merge conflict is very much lower. To show just how simple it is technically, Docwit [sourceforge.net] is a very small hobby open source project that ties TinyMCE to google-diff-match-patch to do the same thing, but because you can run your own server you don't have to give Google your data.
Google Wave essentially just goes "Hmm, why don't we shrink the update period even further, and (like SubEthaEdit, and also quite like a few other projects that have involved working on XML documents remotely) send operational changes when they happen rather than polling every 30 seconds?". The change size gets even smaller, and with it the chances of having to show a user a "merge conflict" or "lock conflict" scary box are also reduced.
You see, it turns out not many people use Google Docs for "proper" documents (of the corporate kind) but a heck of a lot use it for collaborative note taking, as a cheap-and-easy wiki, and for lots of other "low-fuss" tasks.
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Re:Google's quantum leap (Score:4, Informative)
But in the end you still have many copies of documents, and you're always trying to keep changes synced across them. This approach breaks down when you have multiple sources of change... conflict resolution will always jump up to bite you.
There are already good solutions to this problem: it is called revision control [wikipedia.org] and the Subversion [tigris.org] system is a high-quality open source solution to most common version control / sharing scenarios. Visual Source Safe wishes that it could be as good as Subversion, but the open source crowd beat them to it.
The problem with generic revision control systems is that rich document formats like odf and ms doc are not inherently mergeable without knowledge of file formats. Some tools (mercurial [selenic.com] being one) can invoke external merge tools which in theory allow users to manually merge documents. But it never works as well as plain text source code.
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Even a stopped clock can tell the right time (Score:5, Interesting)
This will become a truism in future times: software is the expression of a social intelligence and the more people are involved, the better that works. FOSS is simply better at solving complex problems (like "how to build an operating system") than closed source development.
Ironically, while Google depends on FOSS for its most innovative attacks on Microsoft (Android, for example, which has leapt over WinCE and Symbian with what appears little effort), Google keeps its most valuable technology (searching) completely closed.
Thus, one can conclude that this is also Google's long term weakness. Microsoft: if you want to beat Google, find a way to develop a completely open search ranking system.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft: if you want to beat Google, find a way to develop a completely open search ranking system.
That would be the craziest day ever. I wonder if it would come on the heels of Rush Limbaugh touting the virtues of President Obama and the RIAA unilaterally dropping all of its pending litigation and issuing a formal apology to those it has sued.
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Microsoft: if you want to beat Google, find a way to develop a completely open search ranking system.
Ballmer: What's that? You need a chair flung at your head? I could have sworn you just said something about "open skull". I'll fucking kill you and your little Google too!
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"Microsoft: if you want to beat Google, find a way to develop a completely open search ranking system."
And this to me is the most delicious irony in this stinky stew. I think MS is perfectly capable of developing such a thing, but they will invariably find a way to shoot themselves in the foot. I remember hearing a while back that searching for Linux with the MS search engine produced thousands of results while searching the same term on Google produced tens of millions of hits.
Once you've demonstr
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I remember hearing a while back that searching for Linux with the MS search engine produced thousands of results while searching the same term on Google produced tens of millions of hits.
If you put linux into the search box in Bing (without pressing anything), it suggests things like "microsoft linux", "linux vista".
Re:Even a stopped clock can tell the right time (Score:5, Informative)
If you put linux into the search box in Bing (without pressing anything), it suggests things like "microsoft linux", "linux vista".
Oh my what... crazy but true.
It works both ways though, if you put microsoft or vista into the search box it suggests things like "microsoft linux", "vista linux"
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Hi, Kettle? It's me, black! (Score:5, Interesting)
As the guy who designed Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie has no credit with me about complaining about complexity. What is Lotus Notes? Is it a database? Email system? Application development platform? How about all that and more! A good friend of mine was a Lotus Notes developer back in the day said "Lotus Notes is everything you want and need from now to the end of time, and it's all available to you right now."
That is not the hallmark of simplicity.
Re:Hi, Kettle? It's me, black! (Score:5, Informative)
That is not the hallmark of simplicity.
Let me quote what Joel On Software wrote [joelonsoftware.com] about Ozzie and all this "Mesh" thing:
And now Ray Ozzie's big achievement arrives and what is it? (drumroll...) Microsoft Live Mesh. The future of everything. Microsoft is "moving into the cloud."
What's Microsoft Live Mesh?
Hmm, let's see.
"Imagine all your devices--PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones--working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about."
Wait a minute. Something smells fishy here. Isn't that exactly what Hailstorm was supposed to be? I smell an architecture astronaut.
And what is this Windows Live Mesh?
It's a way to synchronize files.
Jeez, we've had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I'm sorry. It seems like it should be. But it's not.
But Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That's just the sample app. It's a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop. And synchronizing files is supposed to be, like, the equivalent of Microsoft Write on Windows 1.0.
It's Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can't stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.
And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn't stop him.
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Re:Hi, Kettle? It's me, black! (Score:4, Interesting)
The other problem Notes has is that it is so simple that companies frequently assign the first user to touch it as a developer. I'm not saying that it is impossible that the Kelly Girl Temp that is in your office this week is a great developer. I'm just say that on average, the code they tend not to be. So, a lot of companies have bad apps written by people who simply are not developers.
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Re:Hi, Kettle? It's me, black! (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh come on! You're living in a fantasy world!
Notes 6.5.1 (the last version I have extensive experience with) did not come out a decade ago. It came out in 2004, and it a gigantic piece of crap. The only thing good I can say about it is that it *finally* worked correctly on NT with multiple users-- only 10 full years after every other piece of software on Earth did!
Are you really complaining that a version of software a over a decade out of date was unstable? If your apps were flimsy, you should have talked to your developers. The Domino system is and has been for a long time a very robust system.
Dude, reality check:
IBM sells Lotus Domino/Notes as an email system, "groupware" if you want to use that term. Look: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/ [ibm.com] Right there on the website, it says the top two features are Email and Calendaring.
Email and Calendaring. Lotus Notes may work for many tasks, but two tasks is *does not* work for is Email and Calendaring. Not even close. Hell, I had to reset Palms at my workplace 3 times a week when Notes would reliably bug-out create appointments that ended before they began-- which of course confused the poor Palm software to no end.
The amount of lost data due to Notes' failure of a UI is legendary. Deleting a copy of an email filed into a folder *also* deleted any other copy in any other folder. Amazingly retarded design. Notes didn't open attachments in the Temp folder as Read Only, so it encouraged users to edit them and save their changes. While, at the same time, it was super-aggressive about cleaning up the Temp folder. I can't even guess at how many documents were lost that way by poor, understandably confused, users.
Yes, Lotus Notes can do all that and a bag of crap, but it's sold as groupware and that is how it shall be judged. I'd go as far as saying that I don't even give a shit what else it can do: it's sold as groupware, and it *sucks* as groupware, and thus it's a failure of a product. (It also costs twice as much per-seat as Outlook, for a far inferior product.)
The anti-Notes trolls always crack me up. They basically say "I once saw a badly implemented application in Notes a decade ago, and it didn't compare to applications that are being written today." It makes about as much sense as complaining about Windows because you didn't like WindowsME.
Oh please. Compare Notes 6.5.1 with Outlook 2003. NIGHT AND DAY. (Notes being "night.")
Here's what I'll acknowledge: there is a certain subclass of human being, you included among them, that are not only blind to Notes' downsides, but actually are huge fans of the program. I won't attempt to change your mind, because I know from experience that your brainwashing is total and complete. But I'd really appreciate it if you didn't just dismiss all criticism of Notes out-of-hand.
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Re:Hi, Kettle? It's me, black! (Score:4, Informative)
The thing that gets me is, Lotus Notes was basically doing the same thing as Google Wave years ago. Distributed persistent documents. A brilliant idea, flawed in execution (and the fact that it wasn't open source so you only had one company to get it from, so it got locked into its own ghetto).
Wave is another attempt at the concept, hopefully learning a few things and doing it simpler, but... surely Roy Ozzie of all people should see the similarities.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The clever bit is that they made a bunch of disparate applications into views of one model. email=RSS=blog=IRC=USENET=document. Yourserver+push+threads+chat+categories+changelogs
The part where they brought up a client that looks like mail(or maybe pine) was the best bit.
Quel Suprise. (Score:5, Funny)
Open protocol isn't the same thing as open source (Score:5, Informative)
Where in Google's presentation did they say that implementations had to all be open source? They simply said they'd supply some of their own code and the documentation for the protocols to allow other people to implement their solutions. They never said all the other people had to open source their versions.
isn't ozzie still on double-secret probation? (Score:4, Insightful)
Lotus Notes = Ray Ozzie
if this man is speaking, I am not listening
by taking wave so seriously (Score:5, Interesting)
ray ozzie tells the world that we should take wave seriously
if ray ozzie had ignored wave, then he would have implicitly communicated it would be safe for everyone else to ignore wave
by throwing a hissy fit over wave, ray ozzie is telling all of us that wave has real potential
google should cut ray ozzie a check for the free PR and advertising
when will people learn that there is no such thing as bad press? all exposure, positive or negative, is good exposure. that's why attempts at censorship often backfire (see: streisand effect)
The current web is too complex (Score:4, Insightful)
An ajax web app that tries to ape a simple desktop app is built with:
HTTP
HTML
CSS
XML
SQL
JavaScript
PHP/Python/Ruby/other scripting language
That's 7 different text-based (aka "simple") languages/syntaxes a developer has to learn just to be able just to get the same basic functionality as a simple desktop application. The current system as it is isn't simple.
I know it's not the done thing... (Score:3, Interesting)
So... it's syncing cloud storage, and a remote control system thrown in. Maybe I don't get its place in the Universe, but there's no denying the technology works well.
This is me commenting on the technology I know about - not used Wave, but it read as a heck of a technology, on paper. I'd be very interested to get my hands on it.
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Ah ha, but it also has built-in remote desktop. And you can invite other people to have access to your remotely shared files.
So... it's syncing cloud storage, and a remote control system thrown in.
I'm waiting for "No one expects Live Mesh... our chief weapons being 5 gigs and syncing... and remote desktop with syncing...
Re:What is this about Google Wave? (Score:5, Informative)
This allows you to share a document and make multiple simultaneous changes, providing a structure to do so all the way up and down... this framework gives you a standard way to do things, that can then be expanded upon in a whole new set of ways.
Yes... this stuff could be done in a web forum... just like you could program everything in assembler... but it's more efficient in many ways to spend a little CPU time to make up for hours of developer time.
This framework will allow others to reach much, much farther and do things you can't even imagine doing via php/javascript.
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Re:What is this about Google Wave? (Score:4, Informative)
If you just want to run a standalone web forum, then Google Wave may not offer much more than a ajax php forum. And if you just want email, then SMTP+IMAP/POP is surely good enough.
The power of Google Wave comes from the unification of various communication and collaboration paradigms, it's federated nature, it's extensibility and it's open-standard and web-centric approach. In the old model if I want to participate in a forum I'll have to register on the web, go back to my outlook to get the verification email, and then go back to web. I'll also have to subscribe to email alerts for new posts, then go back to the web to reply. All these context switching is totally unnecessary and can be frustrating when you have say 10 different web forums, 5 social networks, 3 photo sharing sites, and 2 IM networks and 1 blog. And there is no practical way to for me to search and browse through my entire communication history in one place.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, Google Wave does not immediately offer any new features, but it does simplify many of those things. It is actually very similar to e-mail as it is a decentralized system for storing and transmitting data, except it is designed to be real-time, support threading/discussions easily, and embed various types of applications and rich data easily. This essientially raises an e-mail/IM medium such that it can be used instead of web for simple uses. IM is not suitable because, unlike e-mail and Wave, it does n
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
How about:
"Well I am fully vested and have just cashed out. I must say we suck, I mean we are STILL playing catchup on the web and can't put together a clean OS architecture. In fact, The only was we could improve is if you all went to goggle and we had to really think about what we do to compete.
Well, good night, and Steve? I bolted the chairs down."
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
He's right as far as he goes, it's just that he doesn't go far enough. Google tends to open up their APIs and say to the developer world "Go play with this", Microsoft chooses not to take that risk (and yeah, it is a risk) and keeps a tighter lid on their software. It is absolutely true that this gives Microsoft more control over their brand image and software.
Where he stops short, however, is not looking at the final results. He just doesn't get that open source and open APIs work. Letting the develope
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, no, no, Microsoft turns to Open Source for recursive acronyms now:
Bing Is Not Google
client protocol will happen, eventualy (Score:3, Informative)
When Gmail first launched, they did not support POP3 or IMAP. (no other web provider did either, for that matter) Today, they do.
Because this will be an open protocol (GWFP on XMPP), somebody will eventually develop a client protocol, or (preferably) extend the federated protocol to the client level. If it's any good, Google will eventually implement it. Right now, Google is stuck on Web 2.0 and HTML 5. (and cloud computing?) I think they can be broken free from that, it just takes some presure on a ca
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, it is distributed and decentralised, which is the antithesis of what the WWW is about.
What planet did you grow up on? The "World Wide Web" is comprised of a decentralized, distributed (worldwide) set of computers running web servers owned and controlled by myriad companies and individuals (more specifically, the web pages and hyperlinks). You seem to understand that there is a difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet, but cannot grasp that the "www" part of the equation is thoroughly distributed and decentralized?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Really? Wave allows multiple people to edit the same document at the same time, across company lines... AFIK, this is not anywhere on the radar at Microsoft.
Everybody seems to be forgetting that after Notes, Ray Ozzie invented Groove, which is now owned by Microsoft (which is currently in the process of integrating it with SharePoint).