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Google Says Vista Search Changes Not Enough
akkarin writes "Following Google's complaint to Microsoft regarding Vista's 'desktop search,'
Google claims that Vista's search has not changed enough: 'Google said yesterday that the remedies don't go far enough. Google chief legal officer David Drummond said in a statement, "We are pleased that as a result of Google's request that the consent decree be enforced, the Department of Justice and state attorneys general have required Microsoft to make changes to Vista."'"
Where were they during the 5 years of Vista's development? Microsoft was touting the integrated, universal search abilities pretty much since day 1 of Vista development. There's no excuse for Google not to know about this, since there were preview and beta builds of Vista available for nearly two years prior to release. If they had a problem with this feature, they should've brought it up then, not 5 months after Vista shipped.
Yes, actually it is really hard if you want it to be reliable, well documented, etc. Usually why APIs stay closed is because they don't meet the bar of documentation quality and in order to use it you have to overcome several idiosyncracies and have tight communication with the team that wrote the API. Probably MS didn't have enough time to make it as extensible and documented as they would've liked and maybe they figured it's just file search so keep it closed and avoid the support can of worms you would have to deal with when you open an API that isn't ready for the increased traffic.
-Shippy
Well they do have an API that lets you run programs on their OS, so I guess they do. Their OS isn't "open source," though their kernel is and a bunch of the underlying services are.
And FWIW, Mac OS X has an extensible public API for File Search.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
"MS didn't include a product similar to Stacker in DOS. MS included Stacker itself: they actually copied Stac's code outright"
Wow, that'd be pretty bold of Microsoft, if it were true. How do you know he is right? But of course! He said "Obviously, you don't remember your history that well, either"! He must be right. Let's mod him up!
Of course, actually Microsoft didn't include Stacker "itself", they licensed and included Vertisoft's DoubleDisk, a product competing with Stacker.
Stac of course sued for copyright infringement et al
No, they sued for *patent* infringement on the compression algorithm. I say, however: copyright infringement, patent infringement, it's all the same, who'd notice, right. Microsoft was ordered to remove DoubleDisk, and later on they created DriveSpace, which used different compression method.
I saw, bravo, about contributing to the Microsoft FUD some more. We ought to fight them using any means at all: they're EVIL, right.
Obviously, you don't remember your history that well, either, because this case was much worse than you say here.
The irony...
MS didn't include a product similar to Stacker in DOS. MS included Stacker itself: they actually copied Stac's code outright. Stac of course sued for copyright infringement et al, and MS finally lost the court case, but it was too late for Stac, which went under. The judgment probably got split up amongst the shareholders, but in the end the company died, and MS had succeeded in putting a perceived competitor out of business as they intended, though it came at a small (to MS) monetary cost.
In actual fact, Microsoft v Stac was a patent case and had zero to do with copyright. Software patents are bad, remember, so Stac *should* have lost the case.
Also, as I said elsewhere, what killed Stacker (along with the 3 or 4 other identical programs that were on the market at the time) was plummeting hard disk prices, massive disk growth and a fundamentally fragile-and-prone-to-catastrophic-data-loss application design. Unfortunately for Stac, their buggy whips were no longer a compelling product in the days of the horseless carriage.
I'm blowing moderator points to be able to respond to this, but why not?
What I don't understand, and of course IANAL so I shouldn't understand this, is where do we draw the line on the anti-monopoly power plays? Look, I can buy the argument that Microsoft went monopolistic all over the Internet Explorer saga. You are completely and entirely correct. The entire thrust of the case, as I understood it at the time, was that Microsoft was abusing it's basis as an operating system by bundling in software, not required in an operating system, so that it could grow market presence.
So, Microsoft puts IE into Windows, which isn't technically required for an operating system (despite Microsoft's attempts to claim it needed IE for it's Explorer subsystem, which was nicely debunked by experts) in order to snare the entire browser market. I read you on that one. I'll even grant your reasoning regarding Windows Defender, since I again don't think that's a core component of an OS.
But I draw the line with this search functionality. In my mind, being able to search your "desktop" (ie, the entire hard drive) for a file or document is something I expect, if not demand, in an operating system. If the filesystem doesn't support indexing and helping me to find a file based on a variety of criteria, I'm looking elsewhere. I know, technically, that searching is also not required for an OS, but the distinction is getting finer and finer. To me, Google is just being sour-grapes about this one. If they can prove Microsoft stole their code, abused their copyright, etc, I agree with them. If they can somehow prove Microsoft is deliberately sabotaging competing searches in the source code so they run abnormally slower compared to the native search, I would probably still side with Google (but my resolve gets much thinner).
But just because they are trying to provide a product that performs the same task as something which likely should be a part of the OS doesn't give them (in my mind) the license to demand Microsoft make changes. Why should Microsoft be forced to completely expose (or disable) their own, internal search subsystem in the OS? If you would rather use Google's search, download the blasted thing and "Just say no" to Microsoft's box on the Start Menu. (The irony, of course, is I recall tons of complaints/flamewars on /. in the past over how OS X was so superior for Spotlight than Windows, and then complaints of how Microsoft "ripped off" Spotlight, etc.)
I just don't see how this is the same as Microsoft defaulting the email program to Outlook Express, or the browser to Internet Explorer. Those are separate programs that aren't related to the OS itself, and Microsoft pushed it past the limit by bundling that sort of software and promoting it within Windows. Searching for files, though, should be something that is integral to the OS's file system - and competitors should be welcome to compete, but not get special privileges for doing so.
Wouldn't this be similar to someone like Symantec threatening Microsoft with litigation because Symantec provides a file system defragmenter (in SystemWorks), and Microsoft has a button in Explorer that will start Microsoft's own built-in defragmenter? Maybe Symantec is upset that there's no way for the user to disable Microsoft's, or to make Windows use Symantec's as the default. If Google can do it - so can Symantec. And so goes the contrapositive, also.
Speaking of which, when should we be hearing Google going after Apple for Spotlight? Oh wait - Spotlight has an API that allows anyone to write software to interface with the underlying OS searching capabilities. Which brings me to my question: Would that access (as unlikely as it might be in forthcoming) to Vista searching be enough to satsify Google? If it isn't, than Google's motivations are clearly suspect.
LondovirLondovir