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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."
... then get back to me. Until then , plu-lease, the're just another application , albeit online.
I won't be impressed until I see Google Office. And Gwindows. That will be something.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
I wonder how long it'll be before google snap up HyperOffice. They're based around the apps the guys who made WebOS made, and, to tell the truth, their products are pretty good, it just seems a shame that no-one uses them.
I'd make a bet that google will buy them out, and ruthlessly remarket, rape, and pillage their software.
A few weeks ago I was looking for a document on my company's very large file server. In fact it was a document with notes on a completitors product. So I did a document containing "company name" search. To my surprise it seemed almost ever document in our marketing department and sales departments had mentioned this company in like every second document.
:P
Several hours later I have a very unhappy looking network admin show up at my office curious about why I have so many documents open. Apparently S&M were trying to open some docs and they were locked by me. So I close the 5 documents I had open and give him the ok. He comes back 5 minutes later. 1500 documents were "locked" for my account. MS's search told had opened, and locked every document it listed in the find window and wouldn't release them until I had shutdown my PC.
Now the moral of the story is google isnt going to need to do a lot with a desktop search tool to impress me. Maybe I just ask too much of MS
I'm impressed with what google has done. They definetly (?) have a bright core group of people. But they don't have all that much money compared to other players in the computer industry, and those companies haven't succeded in thwarting M$. I think if google made an OS it would be like their website no frills and FAST. I wish them the best of luck.
"brxref
one thing striking about google is thier objectivity. every technology has been about bringing the results to the fore. no nonsense. be it email, search, ads, catalog search, picture search, news. i use each of these services almost every single day, and some of it several times a day. and they do it all free- now thats one hell of a company. microsoft does a remarkable job of thier offering - but they are always mired in controversy in more than one ways. dubious methods, and always biased. not that thats bad( i do not want to judge them there, the record speaks volumes) - but there are better ways to do it than that. thats what seperates google from microsoft.
Google already has an IM client, Hello. Here is their website.
We're still waiting for these to come to pass:
September 3, 2002
November 23, 1998
December 5, 2002
How long have people been saying the end of Microsoft is upon us?
If Google wants an OS, why wouldn't they just go with Linux? It's free and they already use it internally so it would only make sense. Though I don't think they want the OS market. At least not any time soon.
The Farewell Tour II
Firefox and Thunderbird, and their like, may not be replacing the Windows desktop, but they can facilitate the move away from it. Before I moved to Linux this summer I was using Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, the GIMP and Gaim on Windows. That made it a lot easier to move away from Windows than if I was used to IE, Outlook, MS Office, MSN Messenger and Photoshop.
Why is anything anything?
The masses are not ready to commit everything to web based applications just yet.
No? Why not? Just about everyone I know uses web based mail today, though there are still a few leftovers (who also happen to still use dial-up so I don't think they really count). People are getting more and more used to doing everything online; really, is there that much difference between writing an email to your friend and writing a letter via "GOffice"? Sure, it's online, but with a broadband connection you probably can't tell the difference. And no more shuttling the file from the office to home since it's stored in a common location.
What do most home users/small offices use Word for? Writing letters? What if Google allowed something like a "print to mail", that printed, metered, and sent the snail mail letter? Or faxed messages for you, and billed you at the end of the month? All those people making newsletters and such, how easy it would be to Google from "GOffice" and find thousands of images to use?
I think there's a huge potential for Google to muscle into Microsoft's bread and butter, MS Office. Really, I doubt "mom" would really know the difference between MS Word and "GOffice"; and if you said "GOffice" documents would be available while staying over at Aunt Jude's, and she could easily share it, send it, email it, or fax it to Barbara in Cali, then she'd much rather use "GOffice".
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
First, when you click the close button, it has to pop up a dialog box and ask, "Document has been changed. Would you like to save your changes now?" The possible responses must include the standard choices of yes, no, or cancel.
Second, when your browser crashes, it has to attempt to save the file and automatically recover it when you start up again. If it can't save it, it must have an autosave feature so that the maximum possible amount of data loss is bounded.
Web applications for word processing may be possible some day. As you point out, most of the stuff you need is there already. You do need to add some extra hooks in the browser, though. I wouldn't call those things trivial, either. HTTP is supposed to be stateless. Cookies violate that, but they are too limited to be used for word processing.
Word processing is very stateful, and to enable a web application to provide word processing will require fundamental changes to the way that web browsers operate. Perhaps the changes will be easy to implement, but they are very significant, and should not be made too lightly. The implications for security and privacy need to be examined thoroughly, at the very least.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
All this searching just makes me increasingly baffled as to why MS didn't include some cutesy GUI'd analog to slocate in XP. It seems like such a simple, straightforward technology: there's a perl port of it that's like 70 lines.
they are legally required to put profits for their shareholders above all other considerations
No. You're wrong. Why do so many people think this? They are responsible to their shareholders in that they cannot willfully or illegally lose their shareholders money. They do no have to forsake their values.
No, you're naive. The basic naivete comes from your language, in fact. "They do not have to forsake their values." Sure, they don't. But there's a _lot_ of pressure to do so.
Do you really believe people think this because they are whacky? Take a look at this passage from an article from the Harvard Business School:
Generating corporate virtue
By now, the story of Malden Mills and its owner, Aaron Feuerstein, is so familiar that the company name has become a sort of shorthand for corporate benevolence. The tale briefly told: In 1995, a fire destroyed Malden Mills' textile plant in Lawrence, an economically depressed town in northeastern Massachusetts. With an insurance settlement of close to $300 million in hand, Feuerstein could have, for example, moved operations to a country with a lower wage base, or he could have retired. Instead, he rebuilt in Lawrence and continued to pay his employees while the new plant was under construction.
"Why don't more companies act that way?" is a common reaction when people first hear the story. It is much too simplistic to reply that Feuerstein is a better person than most. Whatever Feuerstein's relative level of virtue, he had far fewer shareholders to answer to than the average CEO. Feuerstein's only shareholders are himself and several members of his family, who presumably share his willingness to sacrifice profits for the sake of the employees' wellbeing. (Feuerstein was perhaps too willing--Malden Mills filed for bankruptcy protection last November.) The typical CEO of a publicly held corporation, by contrast, is accountable to thousands of shareholders.
My purpose here is not to denigrate the share-owned corporation, which is a fundamental building block of democratic capitalism, but to acknowledge that its legal structure imposes certain priorities on its senior leaders. If they fail to maximize earnings for shareholders, managers risk removal by the equity holders to whom they report. Worse, failure to serve shareholders' interests puts the corporation in jeopardy of being acquired by a stronger company or losing access to capital markets. In theory at least, self-interest and self-preservation ensure that no rational executive will engage in activities that clearly erode shareholder value.
For an interesting approach to the problem (and it does exist!), check out the article.
A lot of people are theorising OS here...
Microsoft Avalon is an XML system for writing rich clients that operate on data stored on a server. For the technical people, you have a secure XML Web Service that provides the Model and Controller of a MVC application, and then you have the rich client providing the View and a proxy into the controller.
I am not going to say "this is what Google is going," but Google would have to be scared about this, since in order to use these new features, you have to install a new Microsoft OS and IE, and in the process msn.com/search.msn.com probably take over the browser, and all their tools might not be loadable, etc.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is pushing ease of deployment of applications and security of data as big selling points to this model. If your document never leaves the server, even when you are editing it, if you e-mail a link which is secured at the server, then the document itself becomes much more secure.
And, of course, DRM is trivial when everything has to be routed through the server, too.
If you're google, you're sitting there though going, well we can write XML Web Services, and we can write desktop applications. You might look to develop an alternative, say using Java and XUL for the client application.
You might think user's trust us with their e-mail, and send sensitive documents. We could reuse our storage back end to store word processing documents, we could index them, and serve ads based on that information.
You might think we could provide a word processor for free (as in cost) using this revenue, just as we provide search, webmail, etc. now.
I'm not saying that is what they are doing, but it seems a lot more likely (since it would tie into Google's strongest traits as a company, including name recognition and perceived integrity) that developing a new operating system (which would be outside Google's current realm of strengths).
If your code is acting bloated, and is running rather slow, it's likely and predicted that some loops you will unroll.