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Google's Patents Reveal Strategy To Beat Microsoft
linumax writes "According to 'The Google Legacy,' history is about to repeat itself. From the article: 'Microsoft today is where IBM was years ago. And Google is in a position to do to Bill Gates what he did to IBM. The result could be a new industry kingpin. Arnold, author of The Google Legacy, said in an interview this week that it appears that Microsoft doesn't understand Google in much the same way that IBM didn't understand Microsoft 20 years ago. "It will be the Googleplex from 2004 to 2020 - a network paradigm," said Arnold. "It will be enabled by Google's approach to innovation."'"
Comparing MS and IBM is flawed imo. IBM was the big company before the rise of personal computers that felt it was unstoppable in its world, and did not have the foresight to see that personal computing would someday overtake server style computing. They truely thought that only big corporations would need computers.
MS on the other hand is aware, paranoid actualy that they will be dethroned. While their leaders may act out in stupid and juvinile ways (throwing chairs anyone?), they are aware of the problem and will fight tooth and nail to keep from being dethroned.
Microsoft write an operating system and Office suite - their cash cows.
Google's cash cow is google adwords and google adsense.
Where's the competition between the two? where's the overlap in markets with REAL income, not late 1990s tech bubble crap that doesn't actually bring in $$ to the companies.
From TFA
"In a broader sense, Arnold believes Google is building a "patent fence around search" technology as the firm moves to codify its unique competitive advantage."
Is this good or bad?
During my studies in history I've learned that history _never_ repeats itself. Simply because if there's a situation _similar_ to one from the past there are a lot of factors that are simply completely different.
Regards,
Dennis B. Schramm
Sigs suck!
I wasn't really worried about Google's intentions until I've seen the latest "features" they added to their homepage.
You might have noticed the: "Personalized Home" thing at the top left of your browser.
In order to implement this feature, Google, obviously needs to know who is actually looking at the page, so that it could then personalize it - therefore, you need to "Sign In" to use the page.
To me, this seems like a way to masquerade their true intentions.
By "Signing in" you're actually letting Google know more information then it requires...
You're not only "Personalizing" their homepage, but you're actually creating a mapping between a "user" and a "search".
In other words, Google would now have the ability to know (same account as GMail) which user looked for what - beyond GMail (where they know what each user read).
If you combine all this data, you get a HUGE database containing personal information.
You'd be surprised how much one could learn just by looking at another person's search queries.
I'm sure that in the following years Google would unveil many more features that would practically lead to them having access to ALL of our personal information.
They're just taking it slowly, one step at a time.
This seems to me like a privacy nightmare.
Are we to let Google have all this information, while we sit aside, hoping they'll protect our data based solely on our good faith?
Remember, that by not using their services, you're private information is not protected.
It's enough that 1 person would have your contact information on his GMail account, another would have your e-Mail and some questions you asked. Google would just have to cross-refer and find whatever they like.
Sigs are for the weak.
MS thinks they are the king because they think software is the real source of value. Google is out to prove that services (search, gmail, froogle, adwords, etc.) are the real source of value.
MS knows this and is trying to get into services, but I wonder if MSN search et al are the OS/2 of the day -- a dinosaur's attempt to compete on a changed playing field.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I believe these questions need some revision:
Does Google need an OS? No!That's the real beauty and the real threat of Google. Microsoft still assumes that everything needs an OS. Google is proving time and again that the OS is nothing in the long run. Google is acting on something Microsoft considered a threat 10+ years ago--that the Internet may become an OS unto itself (not in the true sense of OS, but in the sense that its platform negates the need to run a proprietary OS like Windows).
Does Google have the technology to release Google Office? Yes! Blogger already shows that you don't need a client app to have a robust word processor. The same is true for spreadsheets, presentations, and messaging (which they already have). The weak link would appear to be a DB, but the deployment of a web-based database engine would not be too difficult for them.
Can Google enhance it's email system to provide the functionality of Outlook? Yes.
Does Google have a better search system? Yes!
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Are you working at Microsoft marketing or are just too young to remember the Dreamcast?
If you don't know, Dreamcast was made by SEGA, which was one of the most accepted companies in the marketplace, so "acceptance" surely wasn't it's problem.
The reasons Dreamcast failed was:
Of course Microsoft made some stupid mistakes on top of all this:
XBox360 looks like Dreamcast3 to me. They will continue to lose as much or even more money on it than with XBox1.
People are drooling waiting for the next one and I imagine by the time the 3rd generation comes out MS will own the market completely (if Sony and Nintendo's blunders continue apace).
Sony's blunder? PS2 is the most successful console of all time and it sold about 4 times as many units as the XBox.
This is just some guy trying to sell a book. The "news article" is just some publisher trying to draw on the hype around Google to sell this book. The book is actually only available in .pdf format and according to the publishers site is: "Written for business readers, especially senior executives of mid to large-sized, knowledge-based corporations".
Reading the free sample chapter it is even more apparent that most of the claims he uses to back up his argument just don't make sense. For example, he claims "Google's ability to read data from many computers simultaneously is reminiscent of BitTorrent's technology." Honestly, there is probably little similarity between an algorithm optimized for reading data from multiple computers and an algorithm optimized to spread the pieces of a file to many different computers so that they can all share in the bandwidth of distributing the file. Rather, Google's technology tries to organize many copies of data across multiple computers, and then balance the load between the cluster while creating additional backup copies of data when one of the computers dies and stops responding. Such a statement sounds good to senior executives at a large corporation who probably do not understand any of the underling technology, and the author seems to only be riding on the hype of other high profile technologies. I don't see skype mentioned anywhere in the sample chapter, but would be surprised if it isn't mentioned in one of the other chapters.
Plus his "unauthorized snapshot of Google's computing framework" makes absolutely no sense and the second figure shows the "fission occurring" as Google's "software engineering for higher performance" and "hardware engineering for reduced costs" come crashing together. Is this guy for real?
What he has is guesses about some of the exciting things that Google might be developing, but I do not believe history is about to repeat itself and turn the tables on Microsoft, or that Microsoft is in any danger of being run of out the software industry anytime soon.