Gates on Google

EnsignExtra writes " A long and interesting article in Fortune on the battle between Gates and Google. 'Forced to watch Google's stock soar the way Microsoft's used to, and Brin and Page enjoy their roles as tech's new rock stars, Gates brings to the fight a ferocity that nobody has seen since the Netscape war a decade ago. Their popularity gets under his skin. "There's companies that are just so cool that you just can't even deal with it," he says sarcastically, suggesting that Google is nothing more than the latest fad, adding, "At least they know to wear black."...Trying to build a Google killer, however, has turned out to be truly humbling for Microsoft.'"

Comments

Re:Innovate, not copy

[baadger]

Direct quote from the article.

"I remember when [Payne's team] showed off their first prototype in early 2004people laughed because it was so much like Google," says a former Microsoft executive. "We had copied them. That's not how you lead."

They even admit copying the top dogs.

Re:One statment in the article is not true...

[smellystudent]

...or because Opera and Firefox have a Google search field in the toolbars already and don't need a third party to add the functionality?

Re:One statment in the article is not true...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mozilla/Firefox/Opera do not have the google toolbar."

You are wrong, and I dub thee "fuckbeak" for the error...

Google Toolbar Firefox Extension: (there are actually multiple flavours)
https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/morei nfo.php?id=33

Re:There's no need to fear...

[circusboy]

the butthole surfers do the best version of this song...
there's a clip here.

(amazon's clips seem to be mostly wmv, sorry)

.NET

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Microsoft, once it owned the bulk of the market, has been a second-mover.

I don't know whether you do any business programming, but the momentum behind C# and .NET is just massive. There are on the order of terabytes and terabytes of code that have been [or are being] written for that platform.

Now you could say that Sun was the "first mover" with Java, and M$FT was the "second mover" with .NET, but my point is that just because M$FT has been working quietly behind the scenes on something like .NET doesn't mean they aren't innovating. It's just that they're innovating [and grabbing market share] in an arena that isn't quite as sexy as Google, iTunes, or Playstation.

Re:.NET

[smittyoneeach]

Now you could say that Sun was the "first mover" with Java, and M$FT was the "second mover" with .NET, but my point is that just because M$FT has been working quietly behind the scenes on something like .NET doesn't mean they aren't innovating.

That is exactly my point. .Net is far more evolutionary than revolutionary. Not to say that Anders Hjelsberg isn't 16 times the hacker I'll ever be.
Sure, the .Net momentum is massive, and the C# codebase will only grow faster if Mono ever gains traction in the FOSS world.
TFA article touched on the browser war from the standpoint of MS crushing Netscape on price.
Where there article didn't seem to go was into the anxiety in Redmond when they realized that the browser could diminish the importance of the desktop OS in a major way, which is where I was going with the point about Google partnering with Apple (admittedly unlikely, given the personalities in question) or Google rolling a killer Linux distribution (feel the waves of fear emanating from the NorthWest...)

Re:Never write off Microsoft...

[jwinter1]

[T]he reason why MSIE destroyed Netscape's dominance wasn't its superiority, it was because MSIE was just there, an easy mouse click away on every new Windows 95 PC, whereas Navigator wasn't, and needed to be installed from scratch.

Not really. The fact that IE was right on the desktop was certainly part of its success, but IE 5 was substantially better than Netscape 4. Believe me, I was a stalwart Netscape user until a coworker showed me how much faster IE was rendering pages. Netscape then threw out their codebase to build Gecko and couldn't get anything decent out the door for way too long. They also lost jwz along the way, which I'm sure didn't help matters.