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Gates on Google

Posted by samzenpus on from the the-big-g's dept.

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.'"

4 of 755 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Innovate, not copy by baadger · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.
  2. Re:One statment in the article is not true... by smellystudent · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...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?

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    Predictive text is shiv!
  3. Re:One statment in the article is not true... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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

  4. Re:Never write off Microsoft... by jwinter1 · · Score: 5, Informative
    [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.
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    Anything you can do, I can do meta.