Microsoft vs. Google — Mutually Assured Destruction 416
jmcbain writes "Robert X. Cringely asserts that nothing good will come out of the ongoing war between Microsoft and Google: 'The battle between Microsoft and Google entered a new phase last week with the announcement of Google's Chrome Operating System — a direct attack on Microsoft Windows. This is all heady stuff and good for lots of press, but in the end none of this is likely to make a real difference for either company or, indeed, for consumers. It's just noise — a form of mutually assured destruction intended to keep each company in check.'"
Re:First Nuclear Weapon Equipped Post (Score:3, Informative)
Hence nuclear software wasteland.
Re:I hope Microsoft gets stuffed by Google (Score:3, Informative)
A shame that a lot of the products people are looking for tend to be primarily Windows-only, which make those viable options, unviable.
Re:not good? (Score:2, Informative)
You can do all that through a browser though.
Re:First Nuclear Weapon Equipped Post (Score:1, Informative)
dont forget to curse:
U.S. presidents that have used this pronunciation include Bill Clinton, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George W. Bush, as well as Vice President Walter Mondale and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
Re:First Nuclear Weapon Equipped Post (Score:3, Informative)
What's so bad about the emergence of "free crap?" Gmail, Google Earth, Bing, Hulu, Google Docs are all pretty solid services considering the price tag...
And at least one of those (Hulu) probably isn't going to survive as a free service due to the expense of providing it.
Re:not good? (Score:4, Informative)
From what we know today, Google Chrome OS is aimed for a netbook. A netbook isn't something you install heavy apps on. If it's running a heavy app, it's almost always already being hosted on a server and you are just 'remoting' in, i.e. a terminal.
Therefore, this is, very easily, a good compeditor for the netbook market.
Just doing a rough count here at my computer at work, assuming my company was down with it, a good 60 to 80% of my job could be done from a netbook (of sufficent screen size) running a generic properly setup and compatible browser appliance.
There are things that I doubt I could run from it, such as legacy programs built in Windows for accessing out of date systems. But the majority of the none job specific apps (i.e. time clocks, HR management, training, etc.) are all web based. Google Docs is sufficent for the majority of purposes MS Office is put to.
Re:not good? (Score:2, Informative)
You seem to be a bit behind the times [hubpages.com] on this issue.
Re:not good? (Score:4, Informative)
You seem to be a bit behind the times [hubpages.com] on this issue.
I use both Outlook/Exchange and Gmail on a daily basis and I admin an Exchange server (and used to admin Sendmail and Qmail). It's not news to me that you can migrate from Outlook/Exchange to Gmail; I've investigated it. Gmail provides a fresh interface and much faster searching, however the calendar functionality doesn't come close to Outlook. I won't rehash all the cloud computing issues and how a web app is often clumsy when compared to a native application, but the issues are still there.
Your link doesn't address Google Docs versus M$ Office. I use both as well. Google Docs is sufficient for only the most basic word processing and spreadsheets. If one tries to do multipage spreadsheets with formulas, graphs, lookups, macros (Business 101 stuff), Google Docs spreadsheets are painful to use and just doesn't have much of the functionality needed.
You might be able to replace my coffee with Folger's crystals, but not the gas in my car. The same goes with open source/web apps/cloud computing apps and my business applications.