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Gates Successor Says Microsoft Laid Foundation for Google
thefickler writes "According to Bill Gates' successor Craig Mundie, there would have been no Google without Microsoft. 'I mean, the fact is: Google's existence and success required Microsoft to have been successful previously to create the platform that allowed them to go on and connect people to their search servers. Now, Microsoft's business is not to control the platform per se, but in fact to allow it to be exploited by the world's developers. The fact that we have it out there gives us a good business, but in some ways it doesn't give us an advantage over any of the other developers in terms of being able to utilize it.' This comment comes from a lengthy interview between Mundie and APC magazine, which talks with the newly installed strategy and R&D head. Other interesting topics discussed include the future of Microsoft and Windows, OOXML, and and the 'rise of Linux' on the desktop."
I think I want some.
And many others (IBM, Bell Labs, Xerox, Apple, etc.) were needed for Microsoft to be successful. Who cares?
Funny, I didn't know MSFT created the internet, desktop computing, and web browsers.
Google would work just as well if MSFT had been nothing more than a long-forgotten BASIC provider.
So, what microsoft are saying is google is standing on the shoulders of giants.
;)
Well, I suppose they have to; there are no seats left to sit on
liqbase
Al Gore was working for Microsoft when he invented the internet.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
I thought Google only needed a browser to run on, and you can get a browser on any of the various OS I've tried. Well, maybe not that one in the Engine Management Unit, but there again it's not something I thought necessary.
threadeds blog
That without Benjamin Franklin neither of them would be in business. So where's his praise MS and Google? Huh?
http://blog.heavensdomain.net
--
I think this article should have been filed under "It's Funny, Laugh" as the notion that Microsoft 'laid the foundation' for anything is humorous. Did this man ever stop and consider that technology and advancements in networking or bandwidth made Google possible? That the early Google founders themselves may have had something to do with their fate? This was more of a marketing pitch than an interview.
I think someone should point out to this man that simply because Microsoft became successful doesn't mean that another technology wouldn't have risen to fill the same gap.
Like my father always told me, there ain't no shame in being humble. I think Microsoft is forgetting that humility is a virtue & if they continue to talk like they're the savior of man then they're never going to fix the flaws that plague them. This is the classic example of business tactics & marketing trumping technology & progress.
My work here is dung.
The first time I used Google was on an SGI IRIX machine, and the overwhelming majority of my usage has been via FreeBSD and Linux. Please tell me what Microsoft contributed that made this possible? I come up with a big fat ZERO in answer to that question.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
After all, if Microsoft had been able to create a decent search engine for the Internet early on, Google would've never come in to being. Without Microsoft all but ignoring the rise of the Internet in its early stages, Google would never be what it is today. Microsoft's continued dedication to bringing really poor web content to the world allows Google to step up and offer web mail services and tools for the desktop that are useful.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Microsoft owes everything it has to Unix, since C was created for Unix, and Windows couldn't have been written with C...
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
Microsoft didn't invent the net. Google owes its success to Al Gore.
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Next thing you know another Boreopithecus Redmondanus is throwing chairs instead of stones.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The "platform" that Goooooogle uses was not developed by Microsoft. The Internet originated with DARPA. Other companies developed the routing and networking infrastructure. The Web originated at CERN, on a NeXT machine. Web browsing was common on Unix machines long before it was available or easily usable on Windows machines. Windows didn't even support TCP/IP natively when the browser was developed. The web server also originated at CERN, although the first popular one (NCSA HTTPD) originated at UIUC's National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Microsoft was late to the game, late to recognize the usefulness or importance of the Internet, attempted on a number of occasions to try to gain control of the Internet as a platform, and has done little or nothing to advance the Internet on its own (except for adding extensions to standards that would lock people into its own platform.)
Oh...and Goooooogle runs on Linux.
Just look at the evidence. There's no way they could ever make Google compatible with Macs or Linux.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Well, it gets exploited all the time, so they're succeeding.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
...yes, sort of like IBM looking for a quickie outsourced OS helped to create Microsoft.
But not really.
While IBM created the environment for Microsoft to thrive, Google wasn't aided by being inside Microsoft to give them the advantage of official endorsement. Google thrived on their own merits, and didn't have to pull a switcheroo with an existing product line of theirs to get people to use their main product. The packaging they did do was remarkable in it's lack of crassness - simple text advertisements, relatively clean services for images, maps, and tools, etc.
It's the usual progression to see Microsoft's PR switching to a "Well, we're really just like Google - we're really their buddy, see" approach after the usual dismissive phase.
Ryan Fenton
The Bush administration has taken a liking to Microsoft's public relations and historical accounting techniques and wishes to hire them.
Table-ized A.I.
No. The 'salvation' attitude at Microsoft will continue. They can do no wrong, and will defend each legal claim until exhausted (and have the money to do it, too). Their success is an accident of history, boorishness, and illegal behavior, as documented through hundreds of judgments. There's a nugget of good work done here and there, but you won't change their ego, their testosterone-driven hubris. It's silly to try. Step aside, let the train go through, and continue on. Let Gates retire, the sooner, the better. Mundie adds little.
The nice thing about dictatorship is that eventually, the dictators either retire or pass on, leaving lesser leaders in their place. These lesser leaders inevitably fail.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Small point, no one invented electricity, it's nature was discovered, and not by Benjamin Franklin.
without NeXT there'd be no intertube-web-information-highway thingamajig.
without PARC there'd be no mouse
google wouldn't work without either of these companies, but they'd probably do just fine if Microsoft would go under.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Yes, MS laid the foundation for Google to be a success, but not as Mundie suggests.
The analogy would be more akin to Detroit, in the 1970s, laid the foundation for the success of Japanese automakers.
Instead of laying a positive foundation, it was a foundation of failure that gave Google a chance to seize upon.
Much could be said for the entire Web economy -- it was Microsoft's Monopoly position on the desktop and subsequent Failure To Innovate that opened the way for desktop-less computing. And Linux. And for a resurgence of Apple (which could have easily been killed off if not for Microsoft Pinto, I mean, Millennium Edition's reliability and XP's Security).
Thanks, Microsoft!
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
This is very interesting. It is, of course, untrue at almost every level and clause. (The clause "The fact that we have it out there gives us a good business" seems true, though you could argue that it takes a lot more than that.) But this two paragraph set constitutes is a big lie. Or I should say Big Lie. It doesn't matter that it's wrong, some will believe and parrot it. The more energy you spend fighting it, the more people will hear it, and some believe it. Even if you (if you were a senator, FTC commissioner, DOJ head, etc.) don't believe it, you can still grin and use it as an argument against... something.
That's where things get interesting. Why is Microsoft saying this? Is this just the normal self-importance of Microsoft, or the naivite of Craig Mundie, or does Microsoft have a plan to annoy Google by making Google Microsoft's child? I suppose it could be used over and over in arguments against Google, where MS and Google disagree, but is there something in specific?
Let's send a machine back in time(running Linux on a PowerPC architecture so they don't get any bad ideas)
to assassinate Bill's mother before he was born, thereby erasing his entire existence. We can then observe the effects on the present and determine if the statement is true.
I guess I'd better be thankful... Causality is a fun and complex thing. Some things (most) create ever-growing waves of effects that expand polynomially (or is it exponentially?) throughout time. Other things are engulfed (I think)--I suspect that some movement of molecules turns to friction and energy and whether the molecule bounced in this direction or that direction has no effect. Perhaps the actions of a person that starves and dies on a deserted island are engulfed--their effects on the world diminish with time. A man like Hitler, however, forever altered the world, and this world is constantly getting further from a world where he didn't exist (the changes are still growing, we will never return to what the world would have been).
I'm not sure what differentiates an event that is "lost" from one that catches on and expands polynomially? (Or maybe all actions are engulfed, eventually--the Earth is going to be swallowed by the sun in pretty much exactly the same way as it would be if Hitler had not lived.)
Sorry for my ramblings, and nobody had better mention Godwin's law.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
The logic seems to be something like this: Google needed lots of home and office computers to succeed, and most of those computers ran Microsoft software. But that doesn't mean that those computers wouldn't exist without Microsoft. If history had gone differently, they might well be running an OS derived from CP/M instead of from MS-DOS (which was Bill Gates's original recommendation to IBM). Or they might all be running a Unix-like OS (something Microsoft itself once assumed was inevitable). Or IBM might have stayed out of the desktop computer market (which they almost did) and there'd still be no de-facto standard for desktop computers. Or one of the other players might have created the commodity system, and we'd be running something derived from the Amiga or the Atari ST. That last scenario was always unlikely, but personally I'm very sorry it didn't happen that way.
So of course, this claim is hilarious. But we shouldn't laugh too hard. This isn't the first time I've heard technogeeks congratulate themselves for "changing the world" when all they did was surf the waves of technological progress. Even Brin and Page, who deserve a lot of credit for their technological savvy and also for correctly anticipating how search engine technology had to evolve, are just surfers, not the equivalent of Lord Neptune who gets to decides where the waves go.
Microsoft/Vader: Sun/Obi-Wan never told you what happened to Netscape/your father.
Google/Luke: He did. He told me you embraced and extended / killed him.
Microsoft/Vader: No, Google/Luke. I am your father!
Google/Luke: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Finally someone else has stepped up to be the fool of the year as the one who "invented the internet".
(Unlike Mundie, Gore actually never claimed he did. Only that he fueled money into it to get it on track)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But it depends on how you look at it.
That statement he made is complete BS.
Google is successful because of the rise the popularity of the internet.
This can be attributed to cheaper access to broadband, and cheaper and faster PCs.
It just happens that most people accessing the internet use Windows. Ok I'll give them that.
But google owes more to opensource than anything else. With out Linux and Apache, and whole slew of other open source projects, there would be no google. Sure they could have built their infrastructure on Microsoft products, but it would have cost a lot more money, and they may have never been able to get that little startup off the ground.
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
Google Earth is not a Google developed product - they just bought the Keyhole viewer. And you can thank ESRI, MapInfo, Microstation, and others for developing that market.
Face it, Google copies others just like every other company copies others. The whole idea of any company being the One True Innovator is a marketing myth.
The Tao that can be spoken is not the one eternal Tao
I thought the OOXML comments were the most interesting ones in the article. Mundie's answers to the question showed Microsoft's attitude to the ISO approval process. He saw the whole thing as "Well, we almost got enough votes to pass, but hopefully we can persude a few others next time around", not "Well, there are a few technical issues that we need to sort out, and then it should pass"
It's worth comparing this with the ODF ISO approval vote, where not a single "No" vote was cast.
MS see ISO as a little administrative/political hurdle to cross to maintain their document format stranglehold. They have ab-so-lute-ly no interest in using ISO as a way to attain a top quality technical standard, agreed by everyone. Most of the comments about OOXML related to incomplete documentation in the (6000 page!) specification. That's a fair comment, not a dig at MS. If MS actually fixed the fscking spec, more people might vote for it.
No offense, but please take your own advice and don't ignore history. At the time:
1. There was nothing magical about DOS. It just happened to be the OS that IBM selected for their computer, and their computer turned out to be insanely popular. People didn't give a fuck about the OS as such, it was just the thing that came with their PC. If Microsoft hadn't existed, IBM maybe would have made a better offer for CP/M or maybe would have written their own micro-OS.
There was nothing revolutionary about DOS. It was a clone of CP/M. And having worked with both MS DOS and CP/M, I can tell you they were barely program loaders and the most primitive filesystem imaginable (though each in its own way.) Even you could have written your own DOS, if you wanted to, and so could IBM. But again, IBM wouldn't really have had to: CP/M was already insanely popular on 8 bit micros, so it would have been a no-brainer to license it instead.
2. Windows was nothing special either. OS/2 had a graphical interface too, and so did GEM and half a dozen other stuff. MS Windows may have been the most popular graphical interface at the time, but it wasn't the only one by far. The idea that without MS Windows you'd have had to buy some uber-expensive hardware instead, is just absurd. Without MS, you would have gotten GEM or any of the other GUIs instead.
Even skipping past the fact that someone would have filled the void eventually anyway, the fact is: they wouldn't have had to, because there was no void to start with. Alternatives already existed.
Now we can debate whether Windows was the best, and it certainly was the most popular. But thinking that without MS you wouldn't have had a graphical browser on the PC, is just absurd.
3. The IBM PC itself, again, was nothing fundamentally special. There were _plenty_ of other computers competing for the market at the time. Another one would have filled the void.
Everyone rants and raves about how MS brought us finally to $300 computers, but seem to ommit that we had been there before already. E.g., my first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000, a.k.a., ZX-81, which cost IIRC 60$. Now ok, a ZX-81 couldn't exactly run a graphical browser, but a lot of others could. I see no reason why a Sinclair QL or Amiga couldn't have evolved to fill the niche if the PC didn't exist.
Basically the PC may have been the best bang/buck, but it wasn't the only offering by far. It also wasn't the cheapest.
So basically the assertion that without a PC surely you'd have ended up with something much more expensive to go online, is flawed. We don't know at what price the market would have stabilized, if the PC hadn't pushed everyone else out of the market.
4. You'd be surprised how much of the PC's evolution had _nothing_ to do with MS. It was wildly cloned because IBM allowed anyone to clone it, as long as they paid the royalties for the BIOS. Then Compaq did a clean room reverse-engineering and that was the beginning of PCs which aren't encumbered even by that. And so on.
There were a myriad of factors that combined to make the PC ubiquitous, most of which had nothing to do with MS. Hearing that MS single-handedly brought computing to the masses is nothing but revisionism of ludicrious proportions. While they might have had _some_ of the merit, they were just one among hundreds of companies which contributed to the phenomenon.
Heck, even with their DOS, at some point IBM got sick and tired of MS's 32 MB partition limit, so they bought DOS from MS, wrote a better filesystem and sold it back to MS. The intermediate IBM version was IBM DOS 4.0. Or for Windows a lot of the work was paid for b
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Take a NeXT computer. Use it for a while. (Never mind how slow it is. You're working with 15-year-old hardware.)
Then use whatever version of MS-Windows you like. Find one that matches the ease-of-use, flexibility, and just niceness of the NeXT. Subtract the difference in age between the two operating systems.
That'll give you a good idea of how far Microsoft has set us back.
In my estimation, it's about 17 years and counting.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
That's not really fair.
I think it's fairly clear that Mundie is referring to the sudden increase in global data flow that coincided with the advent of the Internet. In effect, I think he's making the claim that without Microsoft's valiant attempts to choke off this dataflow, without its deliberate obfuscations and distortions, without the calculated policies of embrace and extend... I think he's suggesting that without these factors, there would be no need for Google; that without Microsoft fscking it up for the rest of us, we wouldn't need Google to find useful information. And to that extent at least, I think he has a point.
All the same, I still think he's giving MS too much credit: The main problem was that even despite MS' best efforts, there was still to much information to easily organise.
Still, I can see where the man is coming from.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
It was IBM that was under heavy scrutiny back in the day when predatory monopolies was considered harmful for a free market. IBM was under hard pressure and didnt dare to act against anybody, tipping toes. As a result they didnt go after Compaq for reverse engineering the bios and essentially let the PC platform free. Because of this multiple manufacturers of computers could build against an open platform and make clones of IBM PC. Microsoft got in by pure luck and not so little dishonesty. Bill Gates sold an OS he didnt own (QDoS) that wasnt at all ready for use to IBM. Its also believed that Dos did contain a fair amount of CP/M in it. IBM wanted CP/M but a kink in the relationship got them to turn to other places instead. Microsoft didnt in any way contribute to the success of the PC. It was IBM and US antitrust regulations that made the PC what it is today. It could have been any other of the multitude of good OS out there who got a hold of the PC. I had the pleasure to run CP/M before Dos became more usual and Dos was a horrid piece of crap in comparison. My point is that Microsoft greatly overestimatis its importance in getting computers out to everyone. It was just a matter of time and any number of OS could have easily replaced Dos without any problems. All Microsoft has done is to hold computing back by seriously stifling anything thats better by choking and killing things off instead of competing on its products merits.
HTTP/1.1 400
No, what he said, exactly, was:
While it doesn't actually say "I created the internet," it's a phrase that is intended to imply to the average idiot that he did, in fact, create the internet.
Yes, he took plenty of "information superhighway" initiatives. Thanks to some of those initiatives, we have the commercialized internet. However, the internet existed before that - not necessarily funded by any of his initiatives and certainly not because of much legwork done by him.
It was a disingenuous statement and it'd be nice if more politicians were held accountable for that type of spin.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Google doesn't need windows, they just need browsers, html and http, and their linux servers.
none of which was developed on windows.