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Google Might Disappear in Five Years
An anonymous reader writes "Speaking to a packed auditorium at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., on May 12, Ballmer trumpeted the ripe opportunities around Microsoft's sprawling business and questioned the ability of Google to maintain its edge. Clearly alluding to Microsoft's key Internet search rival, Ballmer said: 'The hottest company right now -- the one nobody thinks can do any wrong -- may just be a one-hit wonder.' According to concept developed by Ballmer, the online search engines represent the key points of the future technology, and the leader in this domain, none other than Google, is destined to perish in less than five years. These predictions belong exclusively to Microsoft's CEO who sounds a little like Bill Gates announcing iPod's death."
Ballmer said: 'The hottest company right now -- the one nobody thinks can do any wrong -- may just be a one-hit wonder.'
:-) Seriously though, this is classic Microsoft. "We are not in the market now with a competitive product, but once we are... boy you better look out because we are going to dominate! Granted, Microsoft's business model is to throw something out there that is usually half baked and then refine it until it works just good enough. They then leverage their monopoly and dominate the market. So, Google's dominance may not in fact, be everlasting but Google has shown the world how to make a search engine that works and is simple and elegant. If Microsoft wins the search engine market, our search engines will be cluttered with ad upon ad and suck up amazing amounts of bandwidth. In reality, given a level playing field, I believe the market will continue to speak and decide on the best browser, which right now judging from my logs appears to be Google.
Rather than post that as news, it and the iPod bit from Gates should be moddable. I am thinking Flamebait or Troll, and by Balmer's same logic, Microsoft may not be here in five years either.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
may just be a one-hit wonder
Yeah, so Google only does searching (pretty much) - what is wrong with that? They do a damn good job of it and so far no-one has been able to beat them because they continue to come up with better and better techniques to stay on top. I wouldn't be surprised if Google starts shoring up its other services but as long as they keep their search engine the best people will continue to come back.
If I am understanding the article correctly (which appears to be written in broken english) Ballmer is talking about every online information site supplying meta-information about its content so that search engines are unnecessary. To that I say, fat chance. Why bother if Google solves the problem on plain text?
Just wait until Google releases GoogleOS, like next week, and we'll see who will be gone in 5 years.
--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com/
It sounds like Ballmer is afraid of Google when he makes statements like this. The whole article can be summed up as "Steve Ballmer wishes Google would just go away!".
I often wonder what goes on in CEOs minds when that make stupid comments like this. Are there really people out there that believe what he says?
(somewhere in the wasteland of business)
"Ballmer said Google doesn't have a stable business.. must be true."
(pushes buzzer on desk)
"Mabel? Call my broker and tell him to sell all the Google shares pronto!".
AccountKiller
It used to be that Microsoft might be late, or misguided, but they didn't used to lean on fear as much. First Bill dissing the iPod, now Steve dissing Google's future.
Bill himself once told me that when Microsoft was taken out by a competitor -- something he always assumed will happen -- it wouldn't be a big company like IBM or Sun, but some little company you haven't ever heard of. Well, I hadn't heard of Google then (they didn't exist), but it seems odd for them to start pointing at market leaders like Apple and Google and talking about implosions. If they're worried about the big players now, Bill's vision has changed, or this is all just a marketing smokescreen.
I'm betting on smokescreen, but it portends a level of fear within Microsoft that's higher than I'd thought.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
Altavista was not the Google of 1999. It was simply the best-known of a number of search engines which used much the same algorithm and differed only in the contents of their databases.
All those search engines died because Google's algorithm was so much better that it was a waste of time to use anything else - not because of some mysterious search engine life cycle.
Until someone else comes up with the new Most Brilliant Search Algorithm Ever, Google is going to stay right where it is. If they're smart, they will continue research into making their search better and better, so that *they* are likely to come up with the Next Big Thing.
...And completely wrong about the outcome. Google has one product: data. They are more akin to something like Lexis/Nexis or Westlaw than Microsoft, I think. The thing that makes Google so much cooler is that they also provide good tools to help your data in different ways, like desktop search. Even gmail is just "data"...that you use it to send and receive data is really of no consequence to them, and it's added convience (and value) to you.
Add to it that they sell appliances that can sift and find info on your network, and you've got a winning business strategy for taming the data beast, which as we all know, is growing faster than anything else.
Microsoft is freaked because they're part of the problem, and not the solution: it's their Excel/Word/Outlook files that are being searched (as well as every other type of file supported), and they "just-don't-think-that's-right(tm)", because they can't do it themselves and also. To add to the list of sins committed against microsoft by google, they treat all data pretty much equally...a pdf, word document, html file is just the repository of the data being searched.
"How dare you, google, equate our big fat word docs with a simple html page or *gasp* pdfs!"
I happen to think that given the two very different philosophies of these companies that Google is probably dominating the marketshare of talented developers. Google quite simply appeals more to the geek aesthetic of innovation and using technology to enhance people's lives. MS is all about hampering innovation and using devious business tactics to ensure that inferior technology always prospers. At least that's the general perception.
If you're one of the best software developers out there, who would you rather work for? Even if MS offers more money, it's hard to justify wanting to work for MS.
Gates has admitted in many interviews that the key to the success of Microsoft has always been in attracting the best minds to come work for them. Something tells me that is no longer the case and that is why the writing is on the wall for Microsoft.
It doesn't surprise me that Steve and Bill feel compelled to lash out at anyone who is doing better then they every did. And it must really piss them off that Google's and Apples iPOD successes sprang from originality and real innovation... the not extend, embrace and buyout method M$ has relied on for it's "innovation" for last few decades.
o pic=381
XBox360 Smoke and Mirrors!
Ballmer obviously didn't get the memo from the XBox360 boys about the problems they were having getting those Apple G5s to fit into that tiny little XBox360 case. Here a couple of photos that proof what's really powering those XBox360 videos and more importantly game demos... and it ain't in the case M$ has been showing everyone. Hell the damn thing isn't even plugged in!
http://www.talksudbury.com/forums/index.php?showt
Join every wingle thing in one package and when you loose this single (and probably very small) package you loose every single thing.
Add to that the fact that those "all in one" deals usualy are of poorer quality then the dedicated one. I don't see digital cameras disapearing, sure those cheap "for the clueless consumer" will become the celular phone. But there will be always a better dedicated one.
For those reasons I would say no. I would expect that all the devices would integrate more easily. I see a future where you could use your cell phone to send the picture you just taken with your camera to some buddy, witch phone is in your
PDA. All of that would be possible only by those appareils being near each other.
I see you getting close with your pda to your computer and the pda would sudenly being able to use your keyboard and your 15" ou 20" screen to display their contents. All of this if the computer "turned off".
When the computer is on it could request to automagicly backup every thing in all devices with a given priority for each device. All of that would be authorized by a master device that would have your private key, this could be a small item in your keychain or inside your wallet.
Sure there are details to think of, but all of this is possible with the tecnology we have today. Bluetooth make some of those things, and there is a wireless USB on the way.
Sure you will still be able to take pictures with your phone camera, and use your cell to store some (or all) of the phones from your PDA. But those will be for times where you are caught off guard.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
The problem is that those other devices would have to drastically change how their services are being offered. I don't want to pay to transfer songs to my phone. I don't want to pay a monthly fee in order to keep my iPhone activated.
I trust Apple a great deal more than I trust any cell phone company.
Google's kept their search page simple while continuing to add features. They simply put those features on other pages, and if people happen to find them, great! They don't put up 10 different search boxes on google.com for every single search -- they simply let you change the search on the results page if you want to use froogle instead, or a GIS.
That's one of the big reasons I started using google. And that's one of the big reasons that I keep using them.
While I'm not a fan of the X86 architecture in general, or any of the chips in particular, it is important to keep in mind that what modern X86es have with earlier X86 chips is mainly the instruction stream.
AMD has shown how you can add new registers to an X86 chip while preserving execution compatibility for classic IA32 code. They also added 64-bit registers and instructions while preserving the 32-bit environment (much like SPARC, POWER and PowerPC did their 64-bit versions).
So, is it all that much of a stretch to imagine a mode flag that can be set by supervisor code that drops the IA32 instruction translator out of the pipeline, and starts pulling lower-level instructions for a particular process? All the other ideas are already there in AMD64: 32-bit classic, 32-bit updated with new registers and opcodes, and 64-bit, all timesliced onto the same CPU.
So, while I really don't care for the X86 family, I think it is far from dead.
And maybe removing the CISC decoder isn't that important anyway. Keep in mind the Xeons cache the decoded instruction for a given address, not the raw IA32 opcodes. So when you have an I-cache hit, you can skip 2-3 pipeline stages.
But I do think it would be amazing to see what the brainpower involved in keeping X86 alive could do if they started from scratch. As long as they weren't allowed to think of anything like the Itanium.
Hmmm...
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Longhorn will be great (allegedly) but Apple are already winning that my-OS-has-cooler-features-that-yours battle...href=http://www.trustedreviews.com/artic
I have read that Microsoft have enough money to keep going (paying wages etc) for three years. But there is no sense that they have anything new to offer, just more of the same. Google have grabbed the mind share of the ubergeek squad...weblogging, AJAX etc etc...all the exciting new toys for the nerds.
MS seems to own a greatest amount of mindshare in the upper reaches of business management, mostly non-technical, go with what you know best types. In the server rooms and development departments all the geeks love Linux/Apple/BSD etc etc.
In five years time many of these geeks, who have grown up with MS XP spyware problems, MS in court again on one side and the sleek minimalism of Google on the other, many of these people will be in management. Will they still embrace MS as quickly as their older peers do now?
I doubt it. MS will not disappear, but turn into another IBM...fingers in about 500 pies. I doubt that any non-technical person could tell you what IBM do, just something vague 'with computers'.
Will that day come for MS?
Microsoft, they are a computer company, aren't they? They had that weird software for those big clunky old desktop machines...Nothing like the Google OS running on my digital phone/mp6 player/dvd/game machine/tablet PC.
It's a feasible long-term model if they move beyond website placement... Which they're doing right now.
Google just partnered with a few cell providers to use GoogleMaps and built-in cell GPS and GPRS to move AdSense from the web to the physical world. Theoretically, AdSense now operates within a cell-users physical world. Walk into a pizza shop and an AdSense message will be sent to your phone giving you a coupon for the shop you just walked into, OR telling you a better pizza deal is right down the street.
Here's where it gets interesting... Retail is all about holding your attention. Think of the advantage AdSense businesses will have if they can literally interupt your shopping in another store. Best Buy can now text you their prices for car stereos the moment you walk into another car audio shop.
Google Search, Maps, etc... they're all apparatuses for content. This is the killer app that will expand the internet into your lives.
-logoCulture
http://logoculture.blogspot.com/