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Microsoft's Nightmare Scenario
unityxxx wrote to mention a News.com article about Microsoft's nightmare scenario - the Web as the next platform. From the article: "The nightmare is inching closer to reality and Microsoft execs are apparently paying attention to the decade-old alert. As part of a management shuffle, Microsoft said Tuesday it would make hosted services a more strategic part of the company and fold its MSN Web portal business into its platform product development group, where Windows is developed. Another memo, called 'Google--The Winner Takes All (And Not Just Search),' is also making the rounds. This internal memo, written in 2005, argues that Google threatens Microsoft and the company's crown jewel, Windows."
Easy life over there at news.com -- pull up old articles from 1996, replace "Netscape" with "Google", "Marc Andreesen" with "Larry Page" and "bring your dog to work" with "20% of employees time working on their own projects". The "nightmare scenario" line in the headline, both here and there, even comes out of a Microsoft memo from 1995.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The web is an infrastructure that lets our individual machines communicate with one another. I very much doubt the web will be a viable platform anytime soon, for bandwidth reasons if nothing else.
I think about how I use programs like photoshop and flashmx when i'm developing web sites. There's no way those huge-ass programs are going to be hosted and downloaded/run on demand. On the other hand, I need connectivity to upload my work to the web and test/publish it. The internet facilitates a good deal of things we do, but there's no way it could be a platform anytime in my lifetime.
It's like the relationship vehicles and highways have. Everyone owns their own vehicle, and they're responsible for the good running condition of that vehicle, and the highway facilitates the usefulness of that vehicle.
Sony ha
Yeah that's what I want, all my applications to be server side web-based. That way I can't stop them when they "call home" and report back things like what I'm searching for on the net, the names of the files I'm opening. And I can't stop them from a hacker switching out a DLL on the server side suddenly corrupting or infecting my data. AV and firewalls become useless at that point, and the way modern apps try agressively to monitor what you do and call home, I'm not comfortable with losing the ability to control them.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
However it overlooks the point that Microsoft has extreme execution problems. Consider that even in the operating system "that was fanatically focused on" Microsoft lags Linux
Microsoft's real problem is that with a stagnant company they can't motivate their employees; so all the good ones leave for places like Google. Back when MSFT stock was doubling every few months, it was quite reasonable and fun for a microsoftie to work 18 hours and see his 1 million dollar option package multiply to 2 million and on to 10 million. Now, however, Balmer yells at his developers only to have them check their underwater options from Jan 2000 and realize it's just not worth it.
Could microsoft change? Yes, by sharing some of the billions of profits they make with their employees. But will they? Nope - they're busy saving that money for their shareholders.
If you're a decent engineer, there's no reason to work for microsoft anymore. You're far better off quitting, competing with them, and letting them buy you back. That's the only way to get your fair share of the billions that microsoft's been hording over the past few years.
And that is the problem with Microsoft today.
Why? As you say, much of the world doesn't have access to gas, water, electricity, telephone and all that, but doesn't that actually show that not all the world has to have access to something in order for it to be the next "big thing", so to speak?
Of course, it would be good if all the world did have access to these things, but even though it's not the case, we not only do but in fact have become so dependent on these things that we can hardly imagine a life without them. It doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that broadband Internet access, and applications built on top of it (not applications as in "computer programs", but applications in a more general sense), will soon become... well, not quite ubiquitious, of course, as certain groups will probably not have an interest in these things (my grandmother, for example, while being quite fascinated by computers and the Internet has categorically said that she won't ever get one), but widespread enough that they will reach the same level of fundamentality (I hope that's a word *s*) that electricity, water etc. do.
But to stay on-topic a bit, I think that M$ is, above all, showing one thing here: namely, that they still don't understand that not everything is "all-or-nothing" and that it's perfectly possible to coexist and compete without every player but one going bankrupt or being bought after a couple of years. It's understandable that they don't understand, of course, given their history (they were effectively granted a monopoly by IBM, and have since tried to maintain that monopoly at all costs and to also expand it into other markets), but it ain't true: it *is* possible to coexist.
I wonder if they'll ever understand that.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Sounds pretty damn scary to me, too.
...to name a few problems individuals and corporations will have.
Why does everyone try to make the web more than what it is- an interactive information platform? Just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD.
Please help metamoderate.
Microsoft is boring. When's the last time microsoft produced a cool product that captured your imagination? What is vista? why should I care? office 12 ? Menus are now "ribbons" .. woo hoo
I can't wait to install that baby and stay up all night playing with it and then show it to all my friends and family.
When I read "google" in a headline, I pay more attention...I am thinking "what cool thing has google com up with now?" google earth, cool , installed it, showed it to my elderly parents and they were impressed; Adwords,Adsense - cool how can I earn some extra bucks playing with this.
google wifi? google tv? sounds interesting. Go Google.
You realize that for the longest time MSN.com used Google as it's search, same with AOL.com, and Yahoo. As more and more companies offer the same search power as google (pagerank is no secret now) Google will need to make it's actual search better...which seems to be the ONLY thing they don't focus on these days. Just like Microsoft, they are happy to sit at the top of the heap and not innovate, meanwhile going down all sorts of other rabbit holes that have nothing to do with search... Microsoft still has an advantage in "telling" people where they should search by default. Google can be gone as quick as Netscape until they offer something truly unique.
I'm just not with the soothsayers who think completely distributed computing is coming back. Too many advantages for the providers, too little control for the users.
When a company first goes public people are excited and the possibilites are limitless. But as time goes by Google will be increasingly pressured to cut costs, lose the fat, concentrate on the core revenue earner (ads) and kill off any development projects that are not generating revenue, and maximize the revenue of popular features like Google Maps (expect to see advertising attached to the maps sometime in the near future).
What it comes down to is Google sells ads. That's its core business. Google is a media company. Reinventing a company is expensive and dangerous, few survive reinvention, that's why Google will always be a media company and Microsoft will always be a software company and Ford will always sell cars.
We're only just now beginning to see #4 and #5 come into play. For example, FireFox has clearly hit #4 with respect to MSIE. Linux has done a good job at chipping away at Microsoft in the server market. MySQL has left Oracle bleeding red (even though they're only at #3). Apache has decimated the market for commercial web servers like IIS. OpenOffice has significantly chipped away at MS Office in some circles (but not in the general user case yet). Audacity has become a mainstream app on home recording bulletin boards (even among non-geeks). The list goes on
I'm not saying I think commercial software is dead. Far from it. But companies that treat customers like a revenue source (e.g. web services to replace software) are not a direction that can reasonably compete with open source. The only way to compete with open source is by doing a better job. Where web services -can- compete is by providing useful services that can't practically be provided by most individuals in their own homes---email, web servers. e-commerce sites, maybe even data backups.
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Let me know when I can reliably use the keyboard shortcuts my hands have memorized over the last ~15 years. As in, command-shift-s to save as a new file. If I do that in a web app, what happens? Well, perhaps my browser tries to save the html file I'm viewing, not save the file I'm remotely editing. Or command-f -- what happens? Oh, the browser looks for matching text in the page, not the app.
And I know that you can make custom command shortcuts that the *app* not the browser responds to. But that's retarded. I have to now think of my shortcuts like nested namespaces? Is this the mnemonic for the hosted app or the host? No way.
ZUL is the best bet here, I and I applaud that effort. But traditional HTML web apps simply don't cut the mustard. They aren't applications, in my mind, if they don't behave the way applications have behaved for 20 years. And frankly, it's not like I need to just get with the program and accept the new. The new sucks, it isn't as good as what we've got today. I refuse to adapt to an inferior process.
Wake me up when they can make an app as rich as Flash MX, or Photoshop, or XCode run in a browser.
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...is like turning on your TV, we will know that MS competitors free-but-advertisement-laiden services have transformed the web into a platform. Remember, the Google business model centers around advertisement, and so do the business models of most major television networks. That's not to say that software as a service isn't the new paradigm... but service as a platform is quite a ways off, and if it sucks because it's just like television, we should have seen it coming.
It's not just about web-based delivery, though Google's eye may be on that ball. A server farm delivering Open Office through a compressive technology like NX would be within Google's capability and, if it caught on, would make them Masters of the Universe (TM).
That would be VERY scary to Microsoft, not to mention a whole bunch of other players in the market. NX delivers a pretty good desktop experience (if you aren't a game player) in around 5KB/s of bandwidth. If that were guaranteed virus-free, with backed-up storage for a modest monthly subscription - like a Hotmail or Yahoo but doing your computing not just your email - I know a lot of people who would sigh with relief, happily accept a lightweight thin client and throw out that hideous, malware-ridden fat-client piece of junk in the corner that they never understood and rarely worked properly.
This is equally a problem for desktop Linux acceptance. As Linux pushes for the desktop, the desktop moves to the network ... no place for Linux to land if the desktop is gone. Of course, Linux might drive the lightweight access device but this is a far cry from Linux on the desktop.