Slashdot Mirror
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."
the company best known for its wildly popular search engine
That's what Google do! I've always wandered.
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
...they can rely on the quality of their products and their customers' loyalty.
/painfully straight face
~BS
They shouldn't have any problem competing on a level playing field.
Home of the EULA shirt
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.
Am I the only one who finds it ironic to read about Google's World Domination plans on Yahoo news ? :)
... I won't waste my time explaining what MS has that Google doesn't :)
:)
Google Search - ?
Gmail - Hotmail
Desktop Search - ?
That's how the tally stands for Google
But I gotta love http://www.google.com/firefox
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
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.
I'm holding out to find the G-Spot.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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
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
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
"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.
That sounds too much like "Gwyndows" and, as such, would remind me of an ex-girlfriend that broke my heart. :)
Using Gwyndows would be like having her name tattered on me.
Let this idea die right here, amigo.
Laws are for people with no friends.
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.
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.
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 Google-Microsoft competition is good news for consumers because it means more choices and better products.
Everything else in the story is just fill.
" I'm holding out to find the G-Spot"
I've always thought that is what google should name a new google dating service.
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.