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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 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
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?
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?
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.