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.'"
Chrome OS being open source... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, consumers won't care at first, but the fact that Chrome OS is open source will have, in my opinion, a long term impact on the industry and thus eventually the consumers. Sorry, I would bet Cringely is wrong on that one.
Is cringley a microsoft shill ? (Score:4, Interesting)
honestly, i dont know whether if he is. he surely sounds like one.
Security an issue with Chrome? (Score:4, Interesting)
Cringe-worthy analysis (Score:5, Interesting)
Jesus.
This is like bad science fiction, written before the internet was invented - by Dan Brown. Cringely is such a tool.
Re:Dear Mr Cringley (Score:4, Interesting)
If you think companies don't diversify, you are horribly mistaken.
Do you think that Kraft foods only makes cheese for example? Companies diversify into similar fields.
From a consumer point of view you are dead correct in that you are oblivious to the other dealings of many companies. MS makes money from things other than windows and office. Lots of other things. If that was all they did, they'd go broke. They make money off programming deals, etc. The closest thing to say about MS and google is: they both profit from software, internet, and hardware. Thus isn't not even expanding their capability, just more work in a field they already work in.
MS attempts at search have been horrible as they haven't improved anything [searchenginejournal.com] and have been using them to hide data [blackdog.ie](look up situations involving bing on that - search anything that is negative about MS). I'm not saying google's attempts at an OS are going to be 100 % successful (as nobody can predict the future with an uneducated guess), but android is optimized for ARM, so it actually makes sense to create a separate OS. Plus, they have a ton of programmers?
Wow, when MS said they had something to announce monday, I didn't think it'd be an article full of spin.
Re:not good? (Score:1, Interesting)
You're the first commenter I've seen (including Cringely, Dvorak, SJVN, etc.) who seems to understand what Chrome OS really is. It's an OS for a Browser Appliance. The machine will boot to a web browser as quickly as possible, but it won't run anything but the browser, which becomes the "OS", or programming platform.
However, I think people aren't realizing the impact this could have. Imagine something that looks like a netbook or laptop (or even tablet PC), but behaves more like an appliance than a computer. You turn it on, and it comes up almost instantly ready to browse the internet. It will be lighter, cooler, and cheaper than a laptop computer. It won't replace the primary computer in my office, but it sure would be nice to have a lightweight portable battery-powered wifi-enabled browser appliance that doesn't burn my legs on my lap as a secondary computer I can use in my easy chair, the back deck, in the bathroom, or in bed. This thing could just about kill off the laptop-as-a-fullblown-desktop-substitute genre completely, which are actually selling bigger than desktop computers right now.
Makes more sense than Cringely lets on (Score:4, Interesting)
Chrome OS fills a number of needs. Whether these turn out to be the needs of end-users remains to be seen, but Chrome OS is not just some industry giants engaging in a slanging match:
1. Chrome OS will help segment Atom from Pentium and Core. That's a pretty big need right there, for Intel, anyway.
2. It could fill a not-yet-filled void: There is a very good chance Chrome will end up dominating netbook Linux the way Android is on the way to dominating handset Linux. Android is a really nice system, and deserves to win versus most other mobile Linux alternatives. Android is accelerating the use of Linux in handsets. Chrome might be that much better than other netbook Linuxes that it, too, ends up dominating and expanding it's market segment.
3. OEMs have been porting Android to devices that may not be the best match for Android. Chrome OS is a better answer than diluting or de-focusing Android to make it a more universal OS.
4. It completes the strategic picture for GWT, Gears, and Chrome: Google has a multi-layered strategy to make their applications run on any OS and any browser. If GWT and Gears on IE on Windows 7 are one end of the spectrum, Chrome OS is the other end. Microsoft has an OS platform where they can integrate search and the cloud and local applications. Now Google does, too.
I would not be surprised to see an Android application runtime on Chrome OS, alongside the browser/JavaScript runtime.
Re:Dear Mr Cringley (Score:2, Interesting)
[quote]MS Makes money from Windows and Office.
Google makes money from search based advertising.
Nothing else really matters to either company.[/quote]
Wrong. WRONG WRONG WRONG.
Yes, those are their primary markets. Google owns the online advertising market, and MS owns the online desktop OS and productivity markets. But things change: companies reach respective market saturation and need to continue to increase their revenue to make stock owners happy, and existing products (once reaching saturation) can not continue to meet those demands.
Why, then, even bother edging into other markets? Google is pushing Android, Chrome, gmail, and a myriad of other things; Microsoft has Xbox and its games, Zune, and so on. Why bother?
Because no product is a Sure Thing. There ARE competitors. MS is pushing into Google's primary domain (Bing), and Google is counteracting them by pushing back (Chrome). I doubt the similarity of connotation in Chrome and Bing's naming is just happenstance.
Re:I hope Microsoft gets stuffed by Google (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes there are competing products but most do not gain much (commercial) traction. Most companies don't gain much outside of their core businesses. And it is hard to come with a product that really can compete and dethrone a firmly entrenched player.
However there are exceptions.
A new browser came out, finally settled on the name "FireFox", and in a few years time got like 30% of the market.
A new mobile phone came out of a company that had never ventured in the mobile phone market before, got a lot of hype, and now is the reference to which all other phones are compared. This is Apple's iPhone of course.
Asus' EEEPC came out and virtually overnight created a new market, and now every manufacturer wants to have a cheap netbook on the market, in the 10" size range.
So there are more examples. Google itself is one: without any advertising it became the de-facto standard for searching, the name even became even a verb.
Who knows what this GoogleOS will do. Maybe it is really that much better than Windows. Google has the media attention already, that helps a lot to at least attract publicity. We are all expecting ARM processor based netbooks soon (prototypes have been demoed already), and Windows simply does not run on that processor. Whether ARM based netbooks/notebooks with GoogleOS or some Linux distro (e.g. NetBuntu) will make it remains to be seen. It would surprise me if it really makes a big impact on the market, though it would make things very interesting if it does.
CRINGELY is an Idiot (Score:5, Interesting)
Ahh, there I said it. It feels good to say it.
He's the broken clock of pundits, he's right twice a day, but only by accident.
The problem with Google vs Microsoft is that Google should have made this move 6 years ago and it would have been in place to capitalize on the fiasco that is/was Vista.
The advantage Google has over, say, Canonical with Ubuntu, ls that everyone knows who Google is, sheesh, its used as a verb. Google docs is getting some uptake in smaller companies. OpenOffice is getting some uptake in others. The economy is helping the lower cost alternatives. People with skills are losing jobs and turning to lower cost or free alternatives in order to make money contracting.
Google can deal with Intuit, Adobe, and others to get their apps ported to Linux.
Google has the resources to make it happen. To beat Microsoft on the desktop market. The question is will they?
Re:not good? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:isn't that a good thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I hope Microsoft gets stuffed by Google (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple? Everything is a major pain in the ass for developers when compared to the simplicity of developing for Windows.
Google? Let's face it, even Java developers admit now that
And btw, even the iPhone is a pain to develop for. The only reason we've seen 50,000 new apps being written for it since it came out is because you can actually make money writing a simple iFart application. Once developers are required to write useful apps that actually have some complexity the developers will start longing for the simplicity and power of the MS development stack again.
direct attack on Microsoft Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
Since when was the release of a new Operating System seen solely in terms of the producers of a mediocre GUI OS working out of Redmond. It also begs the question as to all the negative press about a yet to be delivered platform and the total silence regarding Apples offerings.
Re:First Nuclear Weapon Equipped Post (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:not good? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you think of each web site you use as an application (and in a real way it is) then think about what proportion of the applications you used in the last year were web sites and what proportion were native binaries. Doesn't it make a bit of sense to optimise for the 90% case (99.9%??). Even if you look at it in terms of time used, you might find that the aged among us still have majority use of native binaries, but most younger people probably spend much more time using web applications. It makes sense to confine Windows applications to a Citrix server where someone else can manage them properly and you have no need to learn the complexity of Windows permissions model etc.
I think that the value of systems often comes from the challenge they set themselves. In this sense, the web browser has set its self the challenge of allowing anyone at random to provide code and still providing a safe environment (yes; it's failing at present, but it's close and Chrome sounds even closer) which separates one application from the other. It's pretty clear that Windows gave up completely on that challenge and just decided "you have to have a virus scanner and if anything new comes up, you're on your own". In that environment, the web browser is now delivering much of the value in a system and native applications are becoming legacy. They will take years and years to die (lots of people still use VMS, you know) but they become irrelevant to future development.
Personally I don't like this at all. When you lose control of your computing, you lose control of your privacy. If your files are "in the cloud" then there's little to stop the person controlling the cloud from poking around without your knowledge. Given that MS seems to have given up, I hope that someone from outside can make a third way in this competition.
Re:I hope Microsoft gets stuffed by Google (Score:3, Interesting)
when compared to the simplicity of developing for Windows.
"Simplicity" and "developing for Windows" do not belong in the same sentence, unless the sentence works something like "I like simplicity, but developing for Windows sucks."
Obviously you've never tried to do something non-trivial. APIs that change definition across releases. A compiler and library that does not support standard function names like open/read/write/close. A socket API that's glued on as an afterthought.
It doesn't support auto arrays:
int mysize = somenumber*10;
char buffer[mysze];
I think they've FINALLY got variadic macros.
File access time sucks.
child process spawn is SLOOWW
The development tools are a joke.
Re:Dear Mr Cringley (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, I did read the article, and I have to say it didn't exactly meet high standards of analytical brilliance.
There's a very simple reason for Microsoft to try search business away from Google. If Google makes money at it, then so can Microsoft.
On the other hand, the idea that Google's Chrome OS is going to be a threat to MS Windows on the desktop anytime soon is fantasy. Think about Android. Android is a fascinating OS, but it hasn't taken the phone world by storm -- yet.
I think that Google may be more interested in defining the capabilities of classes of devices. The thing about laptops and desktops is that the platform vendor is not in the capability limiting business. On a mobile phone, it is, because people don't pay for most of their phones. The carriers do, and the carriers are interested in things like lock-in and preventing competition with network services by software using generic network services. Android, I think, is an attempt to liberalize controls on what mobile devices can do.
Likewise in the great spectrum auction, Google tried to leverage their participation into a change of the auction's rules.
So, putting on my wildass speculation hat for a moment, I am lead to wonder whether the Chrome operating system is an attempt to alter the course of the netbook space away from devices that are artificially constrained, and possibly which tie users to specific networks and service providers. One can imagine a version of Windows for netbooks carefully constrained so it doesn't undermine the main Windows product, and which tries to funnel users toward Bing. Given Microsoft's clout with manufacturers, they could well launch such a device. It could be sold at very low margins from Microsoft's perspective because it would generate a regular revenue stream.
That kind of closed world is bad for Google. It doesn't have to take the world by storm with these offerings, it just has to tip developments in the right places to keep the world open. A straight-jacketed version of Windows XP that funnels users to MS services but is cheap to put on a netbook might seem like a good deal to a manufacturer, but not if they have to put their systems up against a more open one.
Re:First Nuclear Weapon Equipped Post (Score:3, Interesting)
There will be another Google, there is no doubt about that. If they went down new companies would emerge to replace the parts that google left behind.
Microsoft on the other hand is a monolothic bully who's practices are destroying the computer industry and need to be taken down, even if that price is Google
Saying that, I also highly doubt Google is going to fail, but if Microsoft goes down I will cheer gleefully no matter the fate of Google.
Re:And Bing...? (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft does not compete. Microsoft kills, destroys, eliminates, obliterates. It does not compete.
Google is simply aware that to exist it must fight.
As long as MS owns the desktop, it will try to leverage that to funnel users into Microsoft products and services and away from its competitors.
Of course, Google tries to do the same thing, as does Apple. Which is why I avoid proprietary OSs - they think they own you.
FOSS is a gift. Proprietary software is a baited hook.