Ray Ozzie Calls Google Wave "Anti-Web" 256
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.'"
glug (Score:2, Insightful)
Things that people from Microsoft say about both open source and google are often very stupid, and this bit from Mr. Ozzie is no exception.
I have an aversion to video, so unfortunately I cannot comment on the rest.
Re:Snooore (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Even a stopped clock can tell the right time (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.
Re:Snooore (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Snooore (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Makes sense (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 developer world play with your product produces dozens of ideas that would never have occurred to the people who created it in the first place. That's what Microsoft has never understood.
isn't ozzie still on double-secret probation? (Score:4, Insightful)
Lotus Notes = Ray Ozzie
if this man is speaking, I am not listening
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.
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...
*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.
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.
Re:Even a stopped clock can tell the right time (Score:3, Insightful)
"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 demonstrated that you are willing to sacrifice results and accuracy for market share, it's hard to earn back that trust. MS has stepped into this mess over and over and doesn't seem to learn from their mistake.
So yeah, I agree. MS just has to build a superior product to succeed. Too bad that seems to be the path less taken.
Re:The current web is too complex (Score:2, Insightful)
HTTP
I don't know about that one, how much do you really need to know?
XML
There is next to no XML in anything I've ever written, most communication between services is done in JSON - I doubt there would be much XML in Wave either.
SQL
If you've got a good ORM back-end, there shouldn't be any need to hand-code SQL for most server-side applications.
That whittles it down to four, and I think it's a small price to pay for the advantages of web-based applications (on which I need not expand).
Also, server-side JavaScript is really coming along and will knock out the requirement for one of those skills.
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.
Re:Come on... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, no, no, Microsoft turns to Open Source for recursive acronyms now:
Bing Is Not Google
Re:Hi, Kettle? It's me, black! (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.
Re:Even a stopped clock can tell the right time (Score:3, Insightful)
You seem to imply that Android is closed source?
Did "imply" come to mean "say the exact opposite"?
The hardest part of the search technology, the processing of massive amounts of data and the indexing of that was open sourced as well.
Wow, that's very wrong in at least two respects.
First, what company is the largest contributor to Hadoop? (Hint: not Google. Their MapReduce implementation is still unreleased.)
Second, MapReduce itself is "merely" a tool, albeit a nifty one, not "the hardest part of the search technology". The hardest part would be coming up with the applications that run on MapReduce and actually handle the data. What does Google index on? How does pagerank actually work? These are questions that, to my knowledge, are still Google trade secrets.
If you gave me a few months I could write a fairly unoptimized, fairly poorly-performing MapReduce implementation, but one that still got fairly decent scaleup. If you then gave me a few more months, couple Google engineers, access to their code base, and four times the processing power of Google, I could probably more or less duplicate Google with my MapReduce implementation as a replacement for theirs.
If you gave me a server farm and a few years, I could come up with a crappy search engine, but I suspect no better. Certainly not anything that I could put on Google's MapReduce implementation and have anything that produced something close to the quality of results Google, MSN, or Yahoo produces nowadays.
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.
Re:Even a stopped clock can tell the right time (Score:2, Insightful)
Obviously too many people comparison shopping.
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.
Re:What's this!? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Microsoft praised on the altar of Slashdot!? Blasphemy!"
That's ok, it's wrong.
Ozz is full of shit and barely makes sense. His points are self contradictory for one thing.
Re:Snooore (Score:1, Insightful)
Right, except for those pages which snoop the browser and (incorrectly) claim that "this page can only be viewed by internet explorer" (though I suppose that since they're restricting it to IE-only, they are right). But those sorts of pages are, themselves, anti-web.
Re:Snooore (Score:2, Insightful)
Ohmigod. Really? Yes. I just looked it up. Its really file synchronization.
How is this in any way related to Google Waves? Why is Ray Douchebag (sp?) comparing a file synchronization utlility to an all-encompassing communications tool? Is it just because these are the latest products from Google and Microsoft? Should Apple start comparing the iPhone 3GS to Google waves?
I mean, on the one hand, Waves combines email, instant messaging, and file sharing, but it doesn't have an autofocus camera. Heh. Waves does have push notification, but I hear that's coming in iPhone 2.0. I mean 3.0 (tho I won't hold my breath!)
Microsoft's best attack on Waves is that its too complicated for developers? That its too hard? Wow. News flash: some developers at Google made it. And it exists (mostly). So is Ray saying that Microsoft engineers aren't as good as Google's?
Holy crap. Wasn't file synchronization solved like a decade ago when the Palm Pilot came out? Oh right. It wasn't, and all solutions to date still suck. I suspect Mesh will suck in its own ways, too (like that it won't work on Linux, or Mac or any non-Microsoft platforms.... but Waves will... Not that waves is a file synchronization tool or is in any real way comparable to Mesh in the first place, but either way, Ozzie loses).