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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?
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
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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.
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
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.
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.