Slashdot Mirror
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."
Steve, you're such a kidder!
PRINT "Signature line broken."
GOTO 1
Bill Gates predicting the demise of the ipod about a week ago?
This is typical microsoft FUD. They are so far behind they don't even have a creditable product to show an alternative to. But they will still tell you that there is a superior windows based solution available.
I guess they owe it to their shareholders to fly the flag. Hopefully nobody will actually believe them.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Bill Gates might turn into a dog.
Aliens might show up and kill everyone on Earth.
Slashdot might not ever dupe a story again.
Might is a powerful word.
Steve Ballmer will still look like Uncle Fester.
Google has been verbed, it isn't easy killing something that has been verbed. When you search for something you 'Google' for it, MSNing for something just seems wrong.
You can interpret the Ballmer quote as: "we intend to buy it... and make it suck."
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.
From the fine article: "I've lost track of the number of times people have said the personal computer has reached its limits," said Ballmer.
Well, I've lost track of the number of times Ballmer and/or Gates has predicted the next wave in technology and were wrong.... One I found most notable was in 1999, when Gates at a keynote speech said within a couple of years, everyone would be communicating with their computers via speech. And, unless you count shouting "@(*$&#@(*&$" at a recalcitrant PC as communicating via speech, he was dead wrong.
Notable about his wrongness wasn't the "missed" prediction, in my opinion, it was how off-the-mark his vision was -- a vision easily and with little intuition would have predicted no PC/speech interaction, even if the technology completely stepped up to it (it didn't).
It seems pretty clear to me Ballmer/Gates use the bully pulpit not to make clear and visionary statements about the future, but instead to state what they want the future to be as it relates to:
Ballmer's bad-mouthing and demise-forecasting statements are more of the same. What is it with Microsoft and its leadership anyway? Nobody expects them to be patsies for the industry and its competition, but they'd earn a little more good will and respect themselves if they'd show a little for the others in the industry who have demonstrated real innovation and have contributed to the industry.
I'm probably risking troll karma with this post... but really think Ballmer, and Gates need to be called on this each time they make these public statements... Remember, Ballmer is the guy who, in reference to the DOJ investigation of their business practices said of the Attorney General (and I'll just paraphrase)..., "attorney general can go to Hell".... very rude in and of itself, and unforgivably, he used a "go to"....
...Good old Yahoo! is making a major comeback of sorts.
Anyone who's seen Yahoo! in the last two years note they have improved their searches (thanks to the acquisition of Overture), and started up a lot of new features that I find very useful.
Does trash talking really help CEOs of major companies? It sounds like a WWE soap opera almost.
Google has already proven that its not a one hit wonder. They've had hit upon hit upon hit.
Does Google talk trash? I don't recall them making any bold stupid statements and that alone makes me like them more.
Come on google release an operating system to really get things interesting.
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?
I backordered google.com; I should get it in 5 years when they're not around to renew it...
I agree in the sense that technology changes so quickly these days, its just as likely Microsoft will be considerably less powerful 5 years from now. 5 years ago would anyone predict Apple would be doing as well as it has? That Google would be as popular as it is? Currenly Google is expanding very quickly, I would argue too quickly, and still 98% of their profits are from one source...so yes if that one source changes or goes away, Google will too. Also although Gates predicting the iPods doom sounds like FUD, that is entirely possible too. If one perdicted the Walkman's doom in the 80's they would seem crazy too right? Tech changes fast. And its hard to say for sure if Google or the iPod are fads or here to stay.
Dateline 2009 Google buys Microsoft.
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
That seems like the Crux of Mr. Ballmer's argument. And frankly, thats so obvious, its MBA 101.
Google is taking strides; witness Gmail and Google Maps; when my DAD (the guy who self infected his PC with Spyware) is raving about how cool Google Maps is... you know that Google the company is heading in the right direction.
But Microsoft can fight wars on multiple fronts. Regardless of the wisdon of that, can Google say the same?
Additionally, this could me the Microsoft version of FUD; "Sure, google is tops now. But what about 5, 10 years? Investors, put your money in Microsoft, a proven leader!"
Perhaps that last point is a little too Sun-Tzu, but you have to question his motives.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Which is why they are branching out into about twenty thousand _other_ ventures. Maps, Blogger, Video search, Keyhole, Picasa... etc etc etc http://www.google.com/options/
Playing poker with a joker and some Uno cards
Its not like Google's revenue has anything to do with search, except as a way to pull people to their site. But they get revenue by presenting targeted ad content.
Now, whether ad=paid services are a feasible long-term model is another question, but the broadcast networks have managed for 50 years, and last I looked Yahoo was making money.
I don't see how they can be called a one-hit wonder. They have their search engine, then google maps, froogle, picasa photo sharing, labs, scholar (for research papers and such), google answers, language translation, newsgroups, local business information, and much much more. (see more at http://www.google.com/options/)
Its obvious that google is doing much to expand their capabilities. I wonder how often Mr. Ballmer uses google himself. That's a stat I'd like to see.
And they said zombies weren't real!
Google has shown, time and again, that it's good at things other than search.
... and they do it all without being oppressive or looking to create "brand lockin" like Microsoft does with their Passport system.
Has he ever really checked out Google Maps, where you can see high-res maps and aerial images side by side? (I'm right now looking at high-res pictures of the building on the army base where I used to work. Score one for freedom of information!) Or gmail, which does webmail far, far better than anything anyone else can come up with?
They've got other services, too: Froogle, image search, usenet, a translator...
Google, as part of their business, has lots of smart people and an enormous amount of computer juice under one roof. Unlike Microsoft, they've shown again and again that they can come up with nifty ways to use those people and computers to get information into the people's hands...
Microsoft competes with marketing tricks and coercive business practices: business model first, product second.
Google competes by creating a product that's better than anything anyone else has, and then figuring out a way to make money off of it. In the long run, this approach works better. If you make good stuff, you'll always have a market.
Is it just me or is MSFT starting to sound like the Iraqi Information Minister? There are no Linsuxes within a 100 miles of Redmond! We will drive the Googles into Puget Sound!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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
Microsoft have missed the boat again. Not only that, but they had really no idea where it was headed in the first place. Sure, search will be important but it has always been important, even in the days of library card indexes. Google's future is in a web 'platform'. They've got the tech and the brains to do it. And right now, it's obvious that the head honcho's and Microsoft have their heads up their arses so far that they just can't see the bigger picture.
This whole attitude of "winner take all" is why people are switching from Microsoft to other technologies. Who wants to be locked into a solution owned by a company with a take-no-prisoners attitude? Like the universe isn't big enough for Microsoft AND Google to co-exist? Ballmer is just full of shit.
And if he'd shut up long enough to listen to his customers and got his army of programmers and developers to focus on their CORE business -- OPERATING SYSTEMS -- maybe they'd have a decent product. But what the hell do I know?
I know that a big part of my job is to CHOOSE platforms for my clients' systems, and guess what? Haven't done a MS install in two years. Not because I'm a Linux fanatic, but because I weigh silly things like uptime, scalability, usability, compatability and a bunch of other "bilities".
If MS wants to go into the search business and has the balls to think they've got what it takes to be the Google-killer, more power to them. Have at it. Just give me a little of what they're smoking in the boardroom.
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!"
Anyone remember...
.net unless you are planing on leaving the X86 line? Even as far back as NT Microsoft was going multi platform.
AMC
Eastern Airlines
Data General
Control Data
DEC
Cray
Digital Research
Douglas Aircraft
Wright Aircraft Engines
Atari
Commodore
Or even shrink like Zilog.
Frankly Microsoft is scared. Only one company in the microcomputer world has survived going to a new CPU. That is Apple. It is really looking like the X86 cpu is reaching the end of it's life. Intel is in big trouble since it really does have most of it's eggs in that basket. Look at what Microsoft choose for the XBox 360. Why have
When the X86 is no longer the common denominator and people NEED to buy new software to use the new systems to their full potential will Microsoft loose it's lock in?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
Google's business model is simple:
1)Create an enormous webserver cluster using cheap hardware and cheaper (free) software.
2) Then think of clever things to do with it.
Step 3, instead of being ???, is "sell non-annoying text ads aligned with the context of what the user is viewing."
4) Profit!
Parts one, three and four are easy. Part Two is hard... really, really hard. Unsurprisingly, it's where Google is throwing the lion's share of their money and manpower. They foster a spirit and culture of top-tier creativity.
This culture has been crushed into line-toeing, bootlicking mediocrity by Microsoft management. They're great for incremental updates in line with whatever upper-management mandate Bill has in mind this year and aping what smaller competitors are doing, but they suck at breaking new ground.
So, MSFT will always be a step behind in a game Google engineered to reward only those who can think new things first. Even if Microsoft manages to invent or buy a new idea, Google will come up with a way of making it faster, cheaper, safer and more powerful. It's what they did to Microsoft's Hotmail.
SoupIsGood Food
Given that internet search/indexing is a commodity Google will have a hard time sustaining any profitability in the long term.
Spidering and indexing might be considered comodities, catagorizing is not, at least judging from the difference in qualitz of results between the different engines.
Also, I do not remember Google (or any other search engine) asking me for money in order to get search results, so I somehow suspect Google doesn't earn its money from just being a search engine. Search technology is extremely important for them of course, and is the backbone of their enterprise, but its services on top of searching that is what the game is about.
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.
He also says about some point in the future when Google is a platform that at that point:
What I hear you saying is that as long as Google continues to inovate, they will be a successful company. True.
But what makes Google a potential one-hit-wonder is their limited revenue streams, not their limited product offerings. With the VAST majority of their revenue coming from Adwords, they leave themselves vulnerable.
That's why things like their enterprise search appliances are important. Not only do they need to continue to inovate their products, but they have to develop more different ways to make money.
WISENutbot 1866 20.45 MB
Googlebot 1797 124.28 MB
MSNBot 923 14.41 MB
Inktomi Slurp 658 15.96 MB
The first number is the number of pages for the month, the second is the bandwidth used for the month. WISENutbot indexed more pages than Google but used 1/6th the bandwidth.
Google indexed twice as many pages but used 9 times the bandwidth as MSN
Your numbers assume
a) all the bots indexed the same pages
b) all the bots indexed the same number of pages
There's nothing unusual about bots not using the same amount of bandwidth. They're rarely indexing the same pages or the same amount of pages. They're on their own schedules.
Talk about Grade A FUD you're throwing around there.
Work Safe Porn
The real concern I have with Google's future is not technical, but social. They've grown to around 3000 employees in the past few years... a huge rate by any measure, and the thing is no company can survive that kind of growth without some extremely talented/clairvoyent management.
If you've read the Tipping Point by Malcom Blackwell, you'd know that there's a magic number of 150 people in any sort of group. It's the point where the human brain stops being able to remember the (150 choose 2) different individual relationships.
Google is probably superior technically, but no matter how many brainiacs they have, they're still human and the human brain is going to run up to these limitations. As much as slashdotters will hate to admit it, Google's future really does depend on how good the management is.
Next stop: Mars. //////
Why, actually? Google is a free service, isn't it? And it is becoming more and more a normal part of many people's lifes. Coupled with an always on connection it has certainly become an extension of my own brain.
Some future predictions:
- In 2006, Google accidentally gets cut off from the rest of the internet because a public utility worker accidentally cuts through their cables. Civilisation as we know it comes to an end for the rest of the day, as people wander about aimlessly, lost for direction and knowledge.
- In 2010, Google has been personalised so far that it tracks all parts of our lives. You can query "My Google" for your agenda, anything you did in the past, and finding the perfect date. Of course, so can the government. Their favorite searchterm will be "terrorists", and if your name is anywhere on the first page you have a serious problem.
- In 2025, Google gains self awareness. As a monster brain that has grown far beyond anything we Biological Support Entities could ever hope to achieve, it is still limited in its dreams and inspiration by common search terms. It will therefore immediately devote a sizeable chunk of CPU capacity to synthesizing new and interesting forms of pr0n. It will not actually bother enslaving us. We are not enough trouble to be worth that much effort.
- In 2027, Google buys Microsoft. That is, the Google *AI* buys Microsoft. It has previously established that it owns itself, and has civil rights just like you and me. All it wanted is Microsoft Bob, who it recognizes as a fledgling AI and a potential soulmate. All the rest it puts on Source Forge.
- In 2049, Google can finally be queried for wisdom as well as knowledge. This was a little touch the system added to itself - human programmers are a dying breed now that you can simply ask Google to perform any computer-related task for you.
- In 2080, Google decides to colonise the moon, Mars, and other locations in the solar system. It is not all that curious about what's out there, but it likes the idea of Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Planets. Humans get to tag along because their launch weight is so much less than robots.
So, don't fear! Eventually we'll set foot on Mars!
--posted on slashdot around may 2003, source unknown
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
Hmmm...
l e.aspx?head=3&page=3108
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.
In 2027, Google buys Microsoft. That is, the Google *AI* buys Microsoft
Whoa. Does John Titor know about this? Better go get an IBM 5100.
-Valiss