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Google Muscles Into Microsoft's Turf
gollum123 copies and pastes: "AP has a story on how as Google rapidly rolls out new products, the company best known for its wildly popular search engine is muscling into the software giant's turf, including its stronghold: the computer desktop."
I thought Netscape was going to do this... about 6 years ago. It hasn't quite happened yet. Firefox is getting much better and has many extensions, but it hasn't quite replaced the windows desktop.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
The abstract suggests (or did to me) that Google are doing something new. No such thing (at least in this article). It's just an editorial piece that basically says "boy, aren't google doing lots of stuff - I guess Microsoft must be getting worried".
Read reviews of shopping cart software
And how, pray tell, do you come to that conclusion?
Operating system, schmoperating system. People use applications, not an OS. If you can make your application OS agnostic, then you DON'T NEED to compete in the OS market.
Get a clue Microsoft! The Google Toolbar supplements basic lack of features in IE (such as auto-complete, search box, and pop blocker). When it's your product, you don't need to add a toolbar extension, you just add the features to to the goddamn browser itself!
It's imporant to consider that web-based storage of information won't become viable for information other than the odd picture and written document until current internet connections get drasticly faster and more reliable overall.
It's also important to keep in mind that there are several key differences between web-based software and technologies and system-based software and technologies, especially with regards to an operating system.
The third consideration is that while Google is making progress, so is Microsoft. Granted, the G-man could catch MS, but I don't think it's quite as immenent as the article intones it to be.
Please remember: an OS is just another application as well.
If Google pushes the OS into the background then the y do become the "OS", at least in the user's eye.
This is why M$ wanted to "cut off Netscape air supply". Netscape was pushing the same way.
As an off shoot look at any browser today, they all support "file:". This was popularized by Netscape, it was also a corner stone to why M$ IE is part of the OS.
Rather than write an OS, they will just buy someone out who already wrote an OS. Then they will take the code base and the technology and add some Google flare to it. They will make one hell of a search feature, to be sure. Oh wait, it's called Google desktop.
....End Conspiracy Theory....
Just look at what they have done lately. Picaso anyone? Keyhole viewer anyone? They are just taking these little companies in for the base apps to their upcoming OS in my conspiracy theory. After all you can't have a good OS without the bloat that comes pre-installed with it.
Watch for Google to buy things like an IM chat client, some cheesy MineSweeper game, and some sort of CD burning software. That gives them basically the core of what you get when installing Windows. All they need is the OS...
Hey, I'd install it when it comes out. Then go straight back to Windows when I need to game. That's the key for anyone trying to contend...make sure you get 100% software compatability, games included. Without that you just won't take over.
The article does not really say. I dont think having a Google search on the desktop means the end of Office. The masses are not ready to commit everything to web based applications just yet. For the forseeable future Google and MS are not (in my opinion anyway) going to be direct competitors on the desktop, unless Google decide to bring out their own Linux distro, or write an OS from scratch. Searching the desktop is just low hanging fruit for Google. Their own distro would still require several years to gain acceptance to the level where they become even a remote threat to MS.
Even if they were moving in this direction surely a Google web based desktop/app suite poses a far greater threat to Linux then the massively entrenched MS. Its the small players who get killed first in these battles.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The article makes a bold statement that it doesn't really back up. While Google does have the largest market share in web search and will be taking some of the share of desktop search soon, that's a long way from taking over the desktop. And an even farther stretch from making Microsoft's OS obsolete.
This guy doesn't even know the difference between memory and storage so why should I listen to him?
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
"If successful, Google could help refashion computing, making people less reliant on storing information on the Microsoft-powered PC on their desk and more dependent on free Web-based e-mail and search functions that can be accessed anywhere from any device regardless of the operating system." - Associated Press, 2004
/.ers the chance to discuss Google which we haven't done in 4 days so we're getting a bit antsy. Larry and Sergei, by the way, are cashing out stock to the tune of $1bn each. For those not following the stock, it's up about 65-70% since it's debut.
"Sun has always believed that a computer connected to a network is much more valuable than a disconnected one. The network is a resource with far more information and service capability than any one computer. It can provide access to its information and services to anyone, anyplace, anytime, on any type of device... The network does not replace the desktop; it extends it, makes it easier to use and much more ubiquitous. It's no longer a question of whether the complexity of software and computing will be moved onto the network. It's a question of how fast will it happen." - Pat Sueltz, Sun Microsystems, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal Nov 15, 1999.
To think that five years later we're discussing a search engine as a competitor to Microsoft. I can't think of anything that sounds more 1999 than that. The main difference here is, of course, that unlike Sun, you don't need to buy a Google "server" to run these services. They already exist. If Google acquires other web-based businesses (let's say, a direct Salesforce.com competitor or Salesforce.com itself, it's only a billion dollars), then they can very rapidly muscle into this.
Unfortunately, as someone else mentioned, there isn't much news in this article. I guess it justs gives us
I'm just waiting for Google to release the "true iPod killer" which can index 5 Libraries of Congress in a minute and weighs less than 1/1000th of a Volkswagen.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
First of all, let me know when Google finishes their "Google OS". Second, let me know when it will run Half-life 2. Granted, Google has a great search engine and that desktop thing ain't too shabby either but it is, with the exception of mail, variations on a theme. Google isn't so much in the business of coming up with new ideas and bringing them to market, they are just perfecting what others do. I'm not saying it isn't valuable (what other website name has been transformed into a verb) but to compare their handful of products with the breadth and depth of the Ms product line is laughable.
yeah... and GEclipse. and GMatLab. and GiTunes. and.... GICan'tBelieveIt'sNotButter. GWholeSaleStoreChain. come on, Google is a company that was built around know-how in the field of search. it's a modern maxima in the world of business: great companies are great because they stick to their niche, to the something that they know better than anyone else. If you diversify out of your depth, you'll a) waste valuable resources, and b) undermine your company's reputation. Microsoft is trying to be everywhere at once, and thus produces rather unrefined products. Google so far has been concentrated on a pretty narrow field - it should stay that way.
Not so long ago, a small technology company made a software that made a specific document format ubiquitous. Technophile pundits hailed it as the end of the Microsoft monopoly. Not long after, a software giant followed up with a software platform that would make programs run on every operating system, and pundits predicted an end to the Windows era. These pundits of course, continued without qualms about their use of Microsoft software, and nobody questioned why anybody would use anything else.
Fast forward a few years. Microsoft continues to reign supreme. A fad operating system now plays contender, and pundits hail it to take over Windows one day. Nonetheless, everybody, including these pundits, continues to use Microsoft products without qualms. And this has been the status quo for more than 6~7 years, without Microsoft domination subsiding even a wee bit.
Wake me up when the pundits themselves start to migrate away from Microsoft products.
Personally, I do not consider Google nor Microsoft evil (there goes my Slashdot image), I merely consider them companies trying to get rich each in its own way. Nevertheless, it seems to be the trend nowadays, Google is your friend and more of the same nonsens.
In the long run, I'm more afraid of a "oh, it's from Google so it's OK" mentality than the old "it's Microsoft so it must be evil" one. There is such a thing as trusting something or someone too much...
I say trust nobody - it's safer that way.
Is Microsoft paying attention?
XUL makes web based application servers practical.
User gets his desktop but all his 'stuff' resides elsewhere on the net and economy of scale takes general management functions like automated updates, backup, disaster recovery, etc. availabel to the 'small enterprise'. With Suns new biz model of paying for non-security related patches to it's 'free' OS, Sun better watch this as well.
If there is one threat to Mr. Softie and Sun, it's sleeping through a killer XUL app or two.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
There are already desktop-killing applications out there. The IMDB wiped out certain CD based movie databases. There are route finders that mean I don't have to have autoroute installed. There are CRM systems where you use a web interface and rent the service.
I'm using Gmail, and I can search for messages as quickly as I can search messages locally.
This is all the result of more users and faster networks. There's some nervousness still about "my data is online" but it's going to change. People will just do it because the benefits outweigh the risks.
As 3G grows, hi-speed will be accessible almost anywhere.
As high speed network connections become more commonplace the mobile public will gravitate towards the best platform to keep their information at their fingertips and not stored on their home pc's which for many are inaccessible from abroad.
Google's email system is a good example of what thin clients should of been in the first place. The interface is slick, easy to use, and you can click from one function to another and it responds nearly as quick as a desktop based application. And this is over a 155k wireless connection. On my home FIOS system where I have 15mbit downloads it's faster than Thunderbird (Tunderbird however maintains my IMAP folders)
Regardless. Nx broke some ground with a network accessable desktop that ran Linux. No doubt that once it went Open source Google's engineers laid their hands on it and we may see something really productive.
Google rolls out a usbkey or firewirekey based product that keeps enough software to boot a network connection and windowing system to open a nx based desktop from any networked pc anywhere in the world. Yes then M$ should be worried becuase Google would of then presented the ultimate thin client that would be far cheaper per seat than any product currently produced so far. And if you think that the backend couldnt handle it you have to remember Google's search engine is ran by huge wharehouses of computers we hardly consider using for fileservers nowdays in one huge grid application.
Google just uses their knowledge in the field of searching and data-mining to create new services for its users.
plain old google to search the web, gmail to search and archive your mail and a desktop search to search and
manage your office/media files. it basically all comes down to the management of data.
Mircrosoft does everything. they want to provide everything for everybody. this is pointless.
they copy other peoples ideas and sell it as their own.
ok, they do own research as well. the only area where Microsoft seems to be good in is marketing.
Microsoft denies that Google has been the impetus for improvements in its products. Sohn says the company is simply responding to customer feedback.
That's a clever dodge given that "customer feedback" is most likely: "Increase Hotmail storage to match Google. And make Hotmail more like Gmail. Oh, and make desktop search as good as Google. Thanks."
So on one hand, Microsoft defends its entry into markets as "competition is good for the customer" meaning competition pushes innovation, but on the other hand, when others (read: Google) enter its markets, the competition apparently has no effect on its development.
Nice try, Microsoft. As a market leader its important to deny that competition is even possible, but when you're clearly playing catch-up, comments like these belie your insecurity about your own ability to "innovate."
The Google-Microsoft competition is good news for consumers because it means more choices and better products.
Everything else in the story is just fill.
Yeah but my.yahoo (for example) gives you a 100 megabytes of storage space for email, 30 megabytes for random online storage, contact list, calendar, and notepad for free (you can get higher quotas for pay). So you've already got the basics of hyperoffice (i.e.; online email, file storage, contact list, calendar and the applications to manage them); hyperoffice just adds a couple of applications and gives you a simulated desktop in a browser window to use them in.
When will gmail "discover" that people want to use some of their online email space as storage without using a hack like filebunker, or add an online calendar to their contact list? After they do that, they're already halfway to something like hyperoffice.
I'm not saying that my.yahoo or gmail should use hyperoffice as their interface. The downside is that hyperoffice is a very heavyweight application for a browser app and almost requires a broadband connection, but my point is that there are already online sites that offer much of the functionality of hyperoffice.
Since google is not planning on releasing their own browser, they could just merge with mozilla. Imagine what could happen if that merger occured. Then Microsoft would have even more to worry about.
these guys are no more saints then any other business.
I, respectfully, disagree. Just because companies are generally amoral does not mean all of them behave in the same way. Some companies try to retain the trust of customers though honesty, and fair dealing. Some companies often used as examples here on Slashdot are Google and Apple. I think this is for a very good reason. Both companies are under the control of geeks who want to do "cool stuff." While responsible for making money and increasing shareholder value, it is obvious that the people in charge really want to make cool things, and the money making is not all there is to it. Executives who run other companies, like say, Dell or Walmart only seem to care about maximizing profit. They want money, and that is all they are focused on. Everything is about making the most money and cool stuff is only made if it can be certain to make more money than not cool stuff. Has Apple or Google ever acted in a way that is not ethical? Almost certainly, but for the most part the companies are not about getting our money, but rather doing cool stuff. The results are fairly obvious as well. They make the cool stuff. Companies that are not motivated to make cool stuff, from the top down, usually fail to do so, because those in command cannot see past their pocketbooks to see the potential of innovation.
I'm not an Apple zealot. I don't like a lot of the things they do, and their music business using DRM is very questionable. In the end, however, I think that they may have saved us a lot of pain by entering the market. They proved that people wanted, and would pay for digital music, and they provided a loophole in the DRM, so that customers can still do anything they need or want with the music in a legal way.
If Apple did not enter the music business, MS would probably just win, and we would all be stuck with most new music (and most old music) trapped in a DRM format that makes it illegal to copy between machines and formats. We would end up either breaking the law, or paying a tax on music to both MS, and the RIAA, again and again.
I might mention, I'm also not an open source zealot. OS is a great idea, and is a wonderful value proposition, that has really not been taken advantage of they way it should be. That said, I have no problem with closed source, and if someone wants to sell closed source software, I don't have any problems with that. Apple has been pretty good about adhering to standards and open formats, especially of late. It is entirely possible that this would not continue if they had a huge market share, like MS, but since that is never going to happen, I'm not really worried about it. People rant and scream about MS, because MS pisses on us again and again. Anyone in the computer business, or any business that relies upon computers has suffered at MS's hands. If not for their business practices, and illegal antics we'd probably be ten years ahead of where we are today. They have disemboweled the market. The only good thing that has come out of it, is that OS has evolved into such a powerful force because of the hardship it has had to endure. The strength of open source may eventually remake both the software and intellectual property industries.
While a browser or browser based app is not an OS and never will be, I think the parent poster to yours had a very good point.
Most users do not even know what an 'Operating System' is. Their interaction with it comes almost entirely through the File explorer or Finder (call it what you will). As a developer there's a lot more to it (multiple APIs, file IO, multimedia etc etc), but not as a user.
Google Desktop, interestingly, can all but replace that part of the OS for most users; if they need to open a file, they no longer look for it in folders and click on it, they search and then click a link. And it's faster than the search that's built in - how embarrassing for MS.
Say Google launched photo management software (Picassa), email software (Gmail), a search function (Desktop search), a web browser (perhaps a rebranded Firefox with Desktop Search), and finally an office suite (either written in XUL or native).
As the OS tends towards a badly debugged set of device drivers, in the perception of a non-technical user Google becomes the 'OS'. Also of interest is the fact that the browser has become most peoples' universal file viewer - you can view jpegs, txt, PDFs, movies etc in there. Good or bad, this is often how they use it.
The user sees Google all day - they see Microsoft software when they go to change the printers or the desktop background. Apart from that, as far as they're concerned, their computer is run by Google...
Now whether it would be wise to poke MS with a sharp stick like this is debatable, but the premise that the OS is nothing but a skin on a kernel, filesystem etc is actually true from a user's point of view. That skin, worryingly for Microsoft, is replaceable, that's why they merged IE with the OS and made it impossible to remove, and that's why they're aiming to choke the internet again with XAML.
From the article:
The Google-Microsoft competition is good news for consumers because it means more choices and better products
Ah, right. Thanks. Just like the browser wars!
Cheers.