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Microsoft and Google Duke It Out For the Future
Hugh Pickens writes "There is a long article in the NYTimes, well worth reading, about the future of applications and where they will reside — on the Web or on the desktop. Google President Eric Schmidt thinks that 90 percent of computing will eventually reside in the Web-based 'cloud.' Microsoft faces a business quandary as it tries to link the Web to its existing desktop business — 'software plus Internet services,' in its formulation. 'Microsoft will embrace the Web while striving to maintain the revenue and profits from its desktop software businesses, the corporate gold mine, a smart strategy for now that may not be sustainable,' according to the article. Google faces competition from Microsoft and from other Web-based productivity software being offered by startups, and it is 'unclear at this point whether Google will be able to capitalize on the trends that it's accelerating.' David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School, says the Google model is to try to change all the rules. If Google succeeds, 'a lot of the value that Microsoft provides today is potentially obsolete.' Microsoft used to call this 'cutting off their air supply."
I don't trust Microsoft running software on my computer and to be honest, after what happened with China, I don't trust Google to store my information online. This isn't tin-foil hat paranoia, I am simply very aware that data is vital to modern free speech (given the advances made in propaganda by those that would deny us the ability to voice our opinions), and its only going to get moreso as time goes on.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
When is the party going to be?
So long as Microsoft is unable to move past the desktop monopoly, Microsoft will fail. Every attempt of Microsoft to find a new and profitable business has relied upon leveraging Microsoft's desktop monopoly. Unfortunately for Microsoft, competitors like Google are making the desktop moot, thereby crumbling Microsoft's very foundation.
Microsoft will just try to buy-out this "Internet" thingy so it's no longer a threat.
I detect an incoming "Offtopic" mod.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Does vaporware run on a cloud?
God spoke to me.
here's what I want. As if anyone cares. Web based CAD programs so people can cooperate in design. Of course they need incentive to do so. The design would be able to be saved either locally or on the web. Simulations and prebuilt components can be located on a web server . That way everyone has the same parts to look at. And people should get paid by how a product sells. Not everything would be OK to build of course so someone would decide which design to mass produce. I am available to write programs ,and of course I have many more great ideas.
I thought Schrodinger's cat was in Pandora's box !? Apparently the cat escaped by pushing the lid open.
Whether applications and data predominantly reside on servers controlled by corporate entities may be asking the wrong question. Considering the exponential increase in Internet connected devices, coupled with increased processor power and bandwidth attached to single devices, the very definition of "server" may be about to change. Let IPV6 get rolled out on a massive scale, and the line between what's a server and what's a client device may become extremely blurry. This creates an environment ripe for the development of new client layers and application models, operating on a much more distributed scale than we're seeing now.
In other words, take the Google model of massively distributed computing and apply it to the whole ecosystem of net-enabled devices. The future will probably be a lot weirder than we think.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I don't really know what you're talking about but a quick Google turned up the following which seems to be what you're looking for: http://www.glprogramming.com/red/chapter06.html
I love my sig.
If we need proof that MS is the new IBM, i.e. delusional in the belief that it is the one and only solution for the customer, this is it.
It is certain that MS now has one of the best solution for corporate on the PC. It is equally certain due to the overhead incurred to defend and maintain the PC, MS does not have the best solution for the home PC. By maintaining the applications on a central server, for free or nearly free, Google has the benefits of the central server in IBM days with the cost benefit that MS supplied. Add to that the idea that many people would now would be happy with an appliance, recall that many people do not work in an office, and one has an opportunity for competition. MS is not doing well in the living room, only in the game room.
I wonder if MS can live in a world where it does not get a cut out of every PC sold. Where more machines, like the OLPC, are not designed to run MS Windows, and therefore cannot be catagorized as a pirate's dream machine if sold naked, or with a non-MS OS. I wonder how many web designers are going to continue to design IE only websites if only 10% of the population browse using a non-MS compatible hardware.
MS creates adequate products, but like IBM they have it wrong. Google is not the arrogant company. MS is. By creating a new os that costs more than the computer. By not suppling IE to all major OS. By waiting 5 years to admit that multiplatform means more than just running on different versions of MS Windows, and interoperability is not bad for the end user.
Let me also say that I would not use Google Apps, not for anything important, but I am not the target audience. I can maintain my own machine and download and install OSS. The world where everyone uses google is not much less scary than the world we are in now. OTOH, at least my office might not tell me that everyone uses MS, and that is all they will support on the website.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I guess, it will be thrown right after the funeral.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Never. Replacing Microsoft with Google will ultimately mean nothing. Come meet the new boss, same as the old boss. You're just replacing one monopoly with another. Proprietary closed-up code and vendor lock-in is bad no matter whose name you attach it to.
My blog
a locally installed app generally runs better
and is more trouble to maintain
how does this play in the market?
generally people do not want to fuss with their 'puters: they want an appliance they can take out of the box and just run
that is why most 'puters are sold with software already installed
running all apps off the net would have one considerable advantage: the computer "appliance" could be made non-modifyable
that doesn't mean you would never run an infected program but if you re-boot the computer you get a fresh start
and so you would re-boot before accessing anything sensitive
As an IT Director my primary concern it the productivity and uptime of my clients. Network based software is IMHO not reliable enough to rely on. Any number of connectivity issues could cause a complete loss of use. With certain applications this is not an option. While developers could mitigate these problems (a small footprint executable that allows me to print something even when the host application is down, for example) I would have a hard time recommending migrating to a primarily web-based office/productivity suite. Too many things out of my control for my comfort. Google isn't who the CEO is going to come to when his secretary can't produce something he needs RIGHT NOW.
Perhaps I'm wrong but it does seem to me that for specific business needs coding up a desktop app is hugely quicker than doing it as a web app. And there doesn't seem to be a significant advantage to web apps.
Perhaps one day something even better than Django (or Rails) will come along and equal the power of desktop development, but I don't think it has happened yet.
Thank you, my gracious sir! But that is not clear on how to achieve what I want to achieve.
All I want to do is take multiple textures and draw them one after the other. If the alpha value of a pixel in the texture being drawn is 0, the color in the destination buffer is shown. If the alpha value of a pixel is > 0, then that pixel is drawn using the color of the source pixel from the texture, completely overwriting the value of the existing pixel in the buffer.
Microsoft and Google have been strengthening their fronts against eachother for a few years now before the epic battle. Personally i'm just happy that Microsoft has a competitor that not only has the strength required, but also has a very different way of running things, thus resulting in one of them remaining as the evolved winner
Pure awesomenes
The Netscape point shows a great knowledge of computer history. A surprisingly large number of people here probably don't remember when Netscape was not only the dominate browser, but an important development platform. Microsoft will try to hinder innovation whenever the desktop is threatened. Gaming consoles... introduce a product and link it to the PC. WebTV ... buy the company.
The next question is, when Google has it's cloud computing monopoly threatened, what will it do to protect itself. Kill net neutrality? Buy it's own wireless spectrum?
The whole drive to do this seems to be only to facilitate comapnies in making more profit.
What about the users interests?
Honestly it seems very clear to me that suddenly having to be connected to the internet (with all its associated performance and security issues) just to do do something like write or store a document would be a giant step backwards.
They have tried Windows CE which still has a shrinking market share in phones, but attempts to leverage the desktop experience, so is doomed.
They've tried tablets... at least 4 times now... and these still get mindshare at MS because they are Billy-boy's pet PC format. Again, doomed because they try to make the tablet into a desktop-like device.
It is often said that excessive success brings about a downfall. For MS this is true. The desktop has been so successful for them that they are not able to see past it.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Why run application off the internet or even store data online unless its directly an online internet all accessible use thing like in web pages, blogs, message boards, etc.?
Its not like any company today can't have their own inhouse server for inhouse control and security and online limited access.
With todays desktop system power and terabyte drives isn't it more likely that what's online now can become offline accessible. In other words, its more likely that we move data from online to offline than vise versa. I've recently put together a localhost LAMP/desktop system just because I found wordpress on firefox to be versatile and simple enough for my aging mother to write her autobiography on while dealing with some eye sight problems (ctrl-+/- zooms) with easy pictures addin. And just because its on a system not connected to the internet the export/import function of wordpress allows the data to be put online should she so chose (she could send me a cd for me to import to a family site I set up - but by her choice, not due some leaky internet).
So even internet applications can be moved to the internet disconnected desktop, where there is security and performance in not being connected,.
Certainly any businesss applications no more needs the additional possible failures and security breaches of internet connection, ISP problems and weakest link connection than does home applications with slower or no internet connections.
Sorry Google, but really, your search engine suffers more and more from ad based listings rather than what I'm looking for (i.e. looking for specification information on an old Dell Latitude xp 450c laptop results in endless finding for batteries, power adaptors, etc sellers.... and virtually no links I could find of any use to me.... I can only wonder who all these sellers are selling to.)
Google, and Microsoft may seem like the bigger players here. But I don't think Google's business model has a chance of winning. Quite simply it's too cheap and with thier primary income coming from advertising and search. How are they going to make money by practically giving you the applications. You'd have to have a link to search of some sort. This becomes counterintuitive to users who don't want to be advertised to while they are typing up thier business plans etc. Microsoft today would need to change thier strategy to creating a simple easy to use web-interface for use with business critical applications. Google has beaten them to the punch with this as anything Microsoft requires browsing through no less than 5-10 links to get what you are looking for. Google does it in under 5 links. I think companies that provide top down solutions for businesses are going to have the largest success in the market. Imagine if you had a web app EIS tool that you could purchase in under 5 clicks that basically lets you within less than 5 clicks find any information you were looking for in your business field because it kept all your data on a secure server. Allowing all your execs to access with thier biometric/password fields.
I'm waiting for the game Age of Conan to be released so I can check it out on my bad ass desktop. Someone from Google can let me know when things like this game and such run in the browser I guess.
Any one who says the desktop and it's software are going away is blowing smoke up your ass.
Microsoft has 380 Billion in shares.
Google is only worth a paltry 80 Billion in shares, etc.
..........FULL STOP.
Remember the JavaStation? No? Remember how all the applications would reside on the network? No? Well, it's been said like seven billion times before and the problem is that the real trend is exactly the opposite one. Applications are becoming increasingly personal. And that, my dumplings, will just continue. Fine, it's just those personalized menus now (which generally are just annoying because it really pisses you off not to be able to find that one thing that you need for that one particular document when you actually do need it) but it will become oh so much more. And this is something which you will want to carry with you. Yes. On you keychain. Together with your desktop. And applications. And documents. You don't want to end up somewhere in Guangzho without your desktop. That would be horrendous.
Storage is cheap and becoming cheaper. CPU cycles are cheap and becoming cheaper. Software is expensive. So what. Most companies don't really mind. And it's not Joe Blow that is earning Microsoft their Office dollars. It's JB Inc. And JB Inc doesn't care if it pays Microsoft 200 dollars. They care if it makes their employees efficient or not. Get dependent on the network in order to do business. I think any company would kill that one in the first SWOT they did.
I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it -- Groucho Marx
Don't know if this redundant or not, anyway - my take on the future of user computing lies in the ability of open source software to be downloaded on demand. Windows Update and apt-get in combination with the trend in virtualization are strong pointers in the future of computing. Users will access data that has an associated list of application handlers, these handlers will be cached locally for rapid loading, after they haven't been used for a while they will expire out of the cache until the next time they are needed and be downloaded again. All this will happen with only minimal input by the user to specify the preferred handler. For fee subscriptions to cutting edge development software will allow companies to make a profit until the open source community decides they like the application and re-implement the features and functionality, this of course does not preclude the ability of open source to lead the way as well.
;-)
Of course, I could be wrong
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Really? I think you can only leverage the thin client model so far before the synergies dry up and you reach fundamental architectural limitations. As the envelope is stretched from web 2.0 to web 2.1 and expanded to breaking point with web 2.1 service pack 1, we may see a resurgence in peer to peer abstracted database solutions enmeshed in a pastiche of performant but robust virtualization layers.
In other words, take the consulting model of highly topical verbose lexicon, and apply it to a popular internet forum to dampen the signal to noise ratio. Think of the possibilities!
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
MS will finally realize what they've done to themselves as a platform company by not supporting web standards. "My apps don't work when I use IE, but they work fine when I use
I suspect something more along the lines of Adobe AIR or whatnot will be more in line with what people are willing to put up with as far as web-based technology apps go. I don't want to have to have a working net connection just to reread an email I already received, or work on a document, etc.
You use the same writing style, misspell the same words consistently and use the same "M$" deal on every single post.
Are you posting to Slashdot with two different accounts? Is that even allowed?
I don't trust Microsoft running software on my computer and to be honest, after what happened with China, I don't trust Google to store my information online.
Don't matter. The writing is on the wall and Microsoft is scared to death. In the future, all you will need is a good browser and the web. I even envision the coming of cheap, super-thin, throw-away, wireless browser-pads that you can buy from an automatic dispenser at the airport or at 7-11. The future, you can't escape it.
... so will the OS. This is because virtualization will render which OS is "underneath" moot. Applications will be delivered with a fully customized OS tightly coupled to it. Big, binary blobs of code+hostOS will be delivered and stored locally in multi-terabyte drives. Data will remain locally stored because nobody will trust having their data flying around the internet for anyone to see or steal. And applications (in the form of pre-installed VMs) will be stored locally so they can be used even when no internet connectivity is available. This, IMHO, is the next wave, and will take 5 to 10 years to play out. Once wireless connectivity is ubiquitous and can provide sufficient bandwidth (gigabit or more), *MAYBE* web-based applications will become more viable, though there still remains the security issue.
If this prediction is true, then Microsoft is still in the driver's seat relative to Google. They are a player in the virtualization market, and they have applications that people will want, albeit in a slightly different form, so they can be run on their Macs, Linux boxes or Windows boxes.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Bandwidth is simply too much of a variable when considering reliability of data delivery in an application. Never mind all the privacy issues and data theft and such. Ask any exec when dealing with a B2B application where mission-critical data is dependent on an unstable network. As cool as I think Google's web apps are you'll never convince an exec.
The network cloud won't engulf 90% of computing, maybe 30-40%. Anything that's processor intensive such as high quality graphics production or code compiling will stay off the network for the most part (I'm sure few /.ers are insane enough to use distcc over the internet). Acceptance of over-the-net software will only happen where it makes sense to the user base.
SaaS (software as a service) is a paradigm shift that most people (especially in business) won't latch on to. I prefer to keep my documents off the net until I'm ready transfer them, and I'm sure most individuals and corps agree. I especially don't want to send them over the net to edit them. If MS is going to dictate how SaaS works, then one only has to look at their track record (WGA, and in general) to get a hint of its fate. Also, look at how DIVX (not the codec) failed. Miserably.
Does he really think businesses will trust their data for storage and transmission in the "cloud"?
Remember, the weak link is not the technology (encryption, authentication, etc.). The weak link is having to trust people.
Nobody gets their credit-card number stolen by a hacker who decrypts their SSL stream. In every case, the breach is caused by a trusted employee who sneaks out with the data.
Businesses know this, and they have an instinctive fear of outsourcing their precious data. Of course, their own employees can sabotage just as easily as an outsourcer's employees can. It's purely a psychological issue: The devil you know is better than the devil you don't know.
You might be able to play with the glBlendFunc parameters to get what you want (but it's not immediately obvious how to do it). The other way would be to write a simple fragment shader.
The sad fact is, just about all need for a "desktop" computer can now be replaced by an Internet appliance and a game console.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
But I don't think Google's business model has a chance of winning. Quite simply it's too cheap and with thier primary income coming from advertising and search. How are they going to make money by practically giving you the applications.
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions_spe.html
They sustain it with the support payments from their clients. These prices may well increase over time or as new features are offered. For the moment it is roughly a dollar a week, per user, for the corporate package.
And once you've used the services within your own department, you'll wonder how your team survived without them--think on the lines of platform interoperability.
Cheers.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
So far, I have immensely been enjoying the decline of desktop computing, and the irrelevance of Microsoft to which it will ultimately lead. Microsoft only knows how to play a zero sum game: for Microsoft to win, everyone else must lose. This business model is fundamentally incompatible with the Internet-based software ecosystem. Internet-hosted software is difficult -- maybe even impossible -- to monopolize. Even the mighty Google will have a difficult time taking over everything. Fortunately, Google doesn't appear to have a monopoly in its business plan -- they just seem to be making a big splash with applications that have good architecture and wide appeal.
Software is moving back where it belongs: behind the glass. Maintained in data centers by people who know what they're doing. Hosted on servers running malware-resistant Linux. Accessed from any location, with any device. This is where the future lives, and although Microsoft can maintain an existence in this future, it cannot maintain a monopoly.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
please tell me, why would anyone want to run each application instance in its own VM?. I mean talk about overhead, especially since its perfectly possible to implement a sandbox without having to virtualize the whole machine. If its about security, perhaps if really IS that critical, otherwise programmers just need to do their job better (I am one btw). There is no way in hell I wan't to run 15 complete virtualizations of the same hardware/OS if it isn't strictly necessary (eg. because they're not compatible).
.NET's language independence (compile other languages to bytecode). Then we would have a platform AND language independent platform, where starting an application is a simple as clicking on the webstart link.
It is not that I am buying into google's webapps everywhere philosophy either.
Actually I don't understand why java webstart apps haven't become popular. They solve most of the problems and Java have been delivering solid performance for most application types since 1.4 (at least a lot better performance than AJAX).
I think SUN should copy
NYT covers the issue well. What struck me from reading it was the impression that Google do have a quick turn around on an idea and an ultrafast motivated and reactive set of employees. While reading the section on Grand Prix I couldn't help but imagine what the development path would have been for such an idea at MS - weekly meetings with 4th tier of management, monthly reports for the 3rd tier of management, quarterly presentations for the second tier of management - then a year into the cycle 1st tier find out about the project and bin it as balmer has been hurling some chairs about and he wants to copy something google or yahoo did 6 months ago.
What also struck me was the tired old soundbites from MS representatives - "The focus is on competitive self-interest; it's on trying to undermine Microsoft, rather than what customers want to do," says Mr. Raikes of Google. Yeah Raikes - your development cycle (or rather complete lack of it for 3+ years after you had destroyed Netscape) on IE fits that quote very nicely. The words from MS all sound a bit wooden - they are trying to come out with all the "we are cool" "googleplex" mentality of roller blading employees who are living the dream - but it doesn't stick - we know how things go on in MS land - the coder who spent a couple of years jumping through bureaucratic hoops of reviews, reports and presentations to simply code the log off button on the start menu for vista tells us that. Gabe Newell got it spot on - MS has become what IBM was when MS were starting up - one vast bureaucracy - MS chided IBM in those days just as Google can rightfully do of MS today. I don't think Gabe extended the analogy, but it fits perfectly that IBM were attempting to cling on to the last of the "mainframe days" back then, just as MS are attempting to cling on to the "standalone desktop days" now. We are entering another paradigm shift - and the more MS say that we aren't the more it confirms that we are.
Call me back when I can write a document online without having to worry about the connection losing it for me.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I filtered my model through the catch-phrase generator one more time, and realized I forgot all about:
1. Paradigm Altering Conditions
2. Social Discordance Trends
3. Micro-Economy Utilization Vectors
Thanks for the feedback! I feel much better now.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Your wrote : "No advantage to web apps?!?"
and I wrote :
"And there doesn't seem to be a significant advantage to web apps..... for specific business needs."
A business with a specific internal developement requirement doesn't usually require the advantages of web apps, and would save themselves a lot of money by doing it as a desktop app.
This is a bunch of hooey. In the future, your desktop computer, camera, cell phone, etc will all be one item. You take this along with your terabytes of storage on said item with you, and when you get somewhere you want to do desktop stuff you plug it into a docking station that does network, video, key board and mouse over some kind of USB v4 interface. The iphone is pretty much already there. It needs to be a little faster, and we need to be able to put openoffice on it, and then we're there.
Actually, if you'd taken 5 minutes even to check the stories on the front page, these posts appear on all kinds of articles, not just 'anti-MS' ones.
They probably appear more often on anti-MS articles because you're guaranteed more 'eyeballs' on those comments, so it's a more widespread audience for these trolls to hit.
Mod me off-topic if you like, I just wanted to correct yet another silly Slashdot assumption - this time that Microsoft somehow has a team of people posting stories about black guys with huge cocks. There's never been an iota of proof that they have anyone on here at all, other than in a casual capacity like the rest of us.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
we wouldn't trust either, by way of privacy, or protection against DOWn time, with our data. they're both way too nosey, & subject to attack/arrest for stock markup FraUD. just more corepirate nazi hypenosys. what is their inclination to have everyone using apps/storing inf. on their $erver$?
Microsoft faces challenges from Google and Linux. That's two fronts. It is also in a battle with itself. The nonsense about trying to protect DRM using the OS is a real handicap.
Thusfar Microsoft has obtained and held its position using the classic strategies of a monopolist. Those won't work against Linux because Linux can't be bought. Microsoft can't even cut off its air supply.
Even if Microsoft wins its battle against Google, it can't kill Google because Google is a giant even if its online applications don't fly.
Microsoft is in real trouble. Google and Linux are both disruptive technologies. As is typical with disruptive technologies, they will eventually become 'good enough' for the majority of Microsoft's customers.
At this point, given the choice between giving my mother (who lives a thousand miles away) a computer loaded with Ubuntu or one loaded with Vista, I would easily choose Ubuntu. I suspect that many of us would make the same choice. Next year, things will change and more of us would choose Ubuntu. That's the way it works with disruptive technologies.
I have a suggestion for Microsoft. Give the customers something that delights them and doesn't get in their way every five minutes. As it is, Microsoft is driving its customers into the enemy's waiting arms.
...but can you show us the code for how you did this with Direct3D?
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
Your entire comment is valid, although Google is really not at fault for not having the specifications for a laptop that old appearing on the main page. If you're referring to the old 50 Mhz model, this link is the best I could do, even from dell.com directly: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/dta/LAT4XX/00000005.htm
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
A big problem is Microsoft is not just looking for internet search/data market they want the internet search/data market to run on and only be browsable by Windows (or something other that is totally MS or provides a revenue channel to MS).
While the web apps department may be all OK with just service revenue and advertising the big wigs in other departments will make sure that the 'embrace and extend' goes into their on-line offerings in order to 'encourage' use of Microsoft enabled PCs and servers to fully utilize those services.
I for one am very resistant into inserting intentional quirks and other bits of muck in my web apps to satisfy a non-standard approach to displaying HTML/CSS and help enable it to be more popular. Firefox, Safari, Konquerer, Opera, Galeon, etc. all render my pages fine with the standards, and I don't have to use MS servers, browsers or OSs (though they work fine as well, only not IE, but there are free alternatives).
Also as far as services, from my point of view (Firefox on Linux) many of the MS technology based sites show up as like broken crap to me (does not support my browser, features not working, pages render poorly, etc.)
Google gets it's high marks because they are not locking the customer (business or user) into a specific application or platform; got Linux, Xserve, MS IIS, that's OK, just add this and you are good. Browser? - is it up to date? Then you are good there too. Like many say of OS X, Google internet tools and results usually "Just Work" and if you start there you probably aren't concerned into looking for other places after that.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Gmail is the perfect example for making the desktop obsolete. There's no more money to be made from email apps. Eudora? Mailsmith? Notes? Pegasus Mail? Outlook? Dead as a dodo.
With Gmail I get a world class spamfilter, reliable backups, and access to my mail from anywhere in the world, all for free.
So if google is really cutting off MSes chair supply...
Here, fixed that for you.
Sounds like an alpha mask, used with a technique called multi-pass rendering.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
It's gonna be a while until I abandon local copies of everything I need.
namgge
and someone who was going about implementing one
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1997/05/msg00835.html
Current 'web applications' specifically prevent you from accessing 'the web' for security reasons, instead only allowing you to access the server you got the 'web application' from. This limitation is needed because if you're going to be running random untrusted scripts on your computer you want to restrict them hugely so they can't do anything nasty.
I believe 90 percent of computing is best done using networks, but there is absolutely no good reason to put 90 percent on your computing on the 'web'. Computer networking has so much much potential than that offered by XMLHttpRequest(). We need to get out of the browser and back on to the network.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
Either way Google will win in the end. Google has already proven that they can make stable, intuitive, it-just-works software available on any platform(windows,linux,mac) with google desktop, Picasa, Gtalk, etc. Microsoft on the other hand has proven that they are a bunch of buffoons when it comes to websites and web browsers. If the future goes to the internet then microsoft is screwed and they need to start making some better products in order to stay alive. Google has also proven that they listen to what the user wants in a web app. Microsoft, well...not so much.
Beyond the obvious issue of the need for continuous connectivity, there are some serious issues with hosted apps that make them much less attractive than they could be.
... they're OK for consumer use and for specialized tasks, but for general work I doubt I'll be interested in web apps for quite a while.
The biggest one, blessing and curse in one, is that there's a 1:1 relationship between client app and service. The hosted app provider controls the client used to access the app as well, something that tends to result in smoother integration, but also a lack of choice.
Consider mail. Few of us would like to have a specific mail client forced on us by an ISP - yet that's exactly what web mail providers do. For mail, people are happy enough to just move to the provider with a client they're happy with, but that won't be possible for all types of app. I'm very dubious about the unification of storage, communication protocol and client into a single entity.
Web apps also make it harder to apply policy. How can you, with web apps, have a shared working directory with snapshots taken every five minutes (aged out progressively) that gets automatically archived into another part of your system & indexed at the end of the week? It's not easy, that's for sure. Businesses with access control requirements, data retention issues, etc also face issues.
Even if the provider tries to take care of those problems, they'll have a hard time making it easy to integrate things like archival with the rest of your network.
The admin also tends to lose insight into the system with web apps. If I hosted my business's mail with Google, I wouldn't get access to the mail logs, control over spam filter sensitivity, or other important facilities. That's not inherently the case, in that Google could offer these facilities, but in general web apps tend to take more of a black box approach.
In short
--
Craig Ringer
From the day they decided they needed to crush Netscape and replace the web browser with something inherently tied to the OS that just so happened to not match everything else, they had been planning for this. The quote they sought (and still would like to see) was "My apps work when I use IE, but they don't work when I use ... ANYTHING ELSE." They wanted webapp developers to totally embrace VBScript/ActiveX controls and all sorts of goodies as they could think of that would keep people tied to an MS OS instance, *even* if all it was doing was rendering a foreign application. They even continue today with SilverLight to try to displace Flash.
Of course, the vast majority of the general internet application landscape didn't play out that way (most ignore those things as they don't bring much that other technologies that are more universal do not). But they have been bitten by their own strategy. There is a Pocket Internet Explorer discussion out there where they explain that despite having flash support, they don't implement the VBScript a few select sites did implement to detect IE/flash. So they were bitten by the very sites that drank the Microsoft Kool-Aid.
But all that aside, it's clear that IE isn't being specifically bitten by any spec deviance (I've not seen things in actual mass deployment not work with IE on the desktop), but it is true that most have avoided the MS-only featureset, and that leaves Microsoft rightfully worried that they will not be able to differentiate in a world where the OS for 90% of the users is merely what the web browser happens to be sitting on.
For my part, I'm not crazy about a vision of a near-100% webapp-only world. It sounds like the dreamworld of tyrannical content providers (your meda player is a webapp, and thus we never give indefinite licenses). The seperation of data and presentation evaporates (today, mutt, evolution, thunderbird, or Google's web interface are all different ways of interacting with your mail, with useful differences). Webapps need to override drag and drop and right-click contextual menus to compete with the desktop paradigm, and today that doesn't work too well, and when it does I'm personally aggravated that I can't user my browser specified context menu. Privacy becomes even more complicated to protect. Yes, data backup and such becomes someone else's problem, but they won't necessarily protect for free your data from yourself (you delete something, it's gone without a recovery fee), whereas if you can own your data and back it up yourself, you have the option of protecting against that as well.
All in all, long haul if it were only one of Microsoft or Google, then no matter who won, the users would ultimately lose.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
#include <d3d.h>
// Do not draw any pixels that are black (ie. they're transparent) when blitting a surface.
using namespace Direct3d;
void main(){
Surface* screen = Surface::GetScreen();
screen->SetColorKey(new Color(0, 0, 0));
Surface* surface = new Surface("image.png", FORMAT_RGBA);
screen->Blit(surface, 0, 0);
}
It's about desktop x web applications.
desktop applications may be usable at home, but are hard to maintain in corporate environment, with hundreds of computers and users. In this sense, web applications are great - centralized data and software - easy to update, easy to colaborate, accessible everywhere. I see only two drawbacks: low responsiveness (in bottlenecked nets) and the insecurity of outsourcing your data.
So, the solution is obvious: web applicatios to be installed in your corporate servers. Your data is secure, the access is fast inside your intranet, user's applications are always up-to-date, and the resources can be accessed from outside, with a bit of pacience.
Google is trying to put everything inside its own servers, so the web applications they develop cannot be installed in our servers...
Microsoft is trying to put everything inside each desktop, so they don't want to develop web applications at all...
I think the way is wide open for open-source web application projects. When will we have a web version of OOo???
It really depends on the field one looks at. Sure for day-to-day activities shared by everyone, it's quite likely that 90% will be web-based. Personal e-mail, blogs, social networks, etc.
However, I don't forsee work desktops moving en-mass to web-based software. I see a balance being created. Perhaps secrataries will be mostly web-based. HR will probably be 50/50 or perhaps a bit more (form publishing, reports, etc written using desktop software, employee information provided through a web-interface). Marketing types will slightly more desktop-based - presentation software so far is a desktop only app and likely to remain so. As a developer, it's never going to be 90% - compiler, debugger, man pages, IDE, etc will always be local (man pages because usually they contain platform specific caveats that might not be mentioned online, although for the general case I usually use a web browser).
So for personal life, I think Schmidt's prediction is likely to come true - web based software simply provides a much easier synched interface (people tends to have at least 2-3 computers these days - laptop + home + work desktops). However, I really do believe that in the next 10-15 years, a model for media PCs will become popular, and that will definitely be desktop software. The reason is that if you've already spent a lot of money on a large HDTV, it makes more sense to hook-up a PC with a great interface (probably better than what boxes have now). Also, a lot more TV shows will be available for free or for a nominal fee as an HDTV stream (i.e. ABC). They just have to solve the UI problem of sitting farther away from the screen than we do with traditional monitors.
Cancel or cancel?
Perhaps, but it's just not in the same league. You can say no to Google by just not visiting them. You can only say no to Microsoft (if you're buying a PC class machine in the US) after you've paid them for a license.
Or you could buy a Dell. Or a Mac.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Here you go... I haven't tested it yet though..
bool ShouldIReturnAlpha( float alphaValue )
{
if( alphaValue == 0 )
{ return true; }
else if( alphaValue != 0 )
{ return false; }
else
{ return FILE_NOT_FOUND(); }
}
For some definition of 90%. I think it will break down according to the 80-20 rule: the 20% of applications that produce 80% of the value will remain on the desktop, while the 80% of applications that produce 20% of the value will migrate to the network. You outsource a large slice of your IT hassle, but only lose 20% of your activity for the duration of a network outage, which are fairly rare events if you have a good ISP. If Google apps takes off, it will probably drive demand for a more reliable last mile, and even small companies will not have much reluctance to pay for this if their IT costs are significantly reduced.
It really doesn't make a lot of sense to have your in-house IT people supporting the 80% that produces 20% of your value.
That, too, is going to become increasingly irrelevant.
I really do want "desktop" or "laptop" computers to succeed, but right now, they've got nothing going for them except privacy and user control, neither of which anyone seems to give a fuck about anymore (see Myspace).
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
There's a saying that he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat it. Every so often for the past couple of hundred years, some nutcase has come out of the woodwork, claiming "free energy" and "perpetual motion". This is all contrary to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, but the "inventors" seem to miss that.
In the mid-to-late-1990's Java was the OS-on-top-of-the-OS that was going to make the underlying OS totally irrelavant when you wanted to run an app. How many Java web applets do you regularly use today?
Later on, AOL decided that they were going to re-write Netscape 5 as an OS-on-top-of-the-OS that was going to make the underlying OS totally irrelavant when you wanted to run an app. Everybody remember what a roaring success that wasn't? It was the total neglect of the browser, whilst concentrating on the web-app-platform, that killed Netscape, moreso than Microsoft's dirty tactics.
However, like moths drawn to a flame, developers keep trying to change the browser into an OS-on-top-of-the-OS that's going to make the underlying OS totally irrelavant when want to run an app. Along comes Google, thinking they can do the impossible.
The perpetual-motion-machine nutcases run afoul of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The browser-based-web-application fanatics seem not to have heard of SARBOX and HIPAA, and equivalent laws outside the USA.
Your Aunt Ethel may use GMail. A university that doesn't want to provide email infrastructure for 15,000 students may use GMail. Any confidential business data, including that same university's HR data, damn well better not be floating around "in the cloud". Web-based computing is out of the question for a lot of corporations and governments, i.e. Microsoft's main customers. And then remember that the average person has a lot of stuff that
Web-apps have other problems...
- How many web-based spreadsheets or word processors have the power of Gnumeric or AbiWord, let alone MS Excel or MS Word?
- You download a browser-based-app, close your browser, and the app disappears, needing to be downloaded again, next time you want to use it. On Gentoo linux, I "emerge gnumeric" (apt-get for you Debian types), and the spreadsheet app hangs around until such time as I order the machine to delete it.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I agree. As fermion pointed out above, Microsoft is proving to be the new IBM, deluded that their solutions are always what's best for customers. Their new solutions are typically encumbered by their perspective of trying to leverage and protect their existing approaches--they just don't seem able to really embrace and exploit the possibilities of cloud computing. A look at the low rate of Vista adoption, and the recent rebranding of PlaysforSure, will also show how far from the mark they often fall, from what their customers and partners really want or need. They'll only lose their arrogance and break free of their legacy when the pressure increases--and it will.
The future will be even more challenging. In a few years Google's Android platform and other mobile devices on WiMax and 700 Mhz wireless, are likely to help push cloud computing into the mainstream. Google, Adobe, Microsoft, and others will all be developing better products. Take a look at Buzzword for a taste of how great a web application can be. Hybrid applications that can be synched and/or used disconnected, and encryption, will address the disadvantages of cloud computing today.
The future will include better options for users that will increasingly be in the cloud. It's likely to get here sooner than Microsoft will be ready for, but they'll eventually adapt and be a force to be reconed with in the cloud.
--
speak.to is about communication.
Why nobody talks about moving the entire OS to the web?
Access from everywhere! No backups! No administration!
There are many examples live and kicking:
G.ho.st
EyeOS
YouOS
There are more, but I liked these the most.
December 22, 2012.
Slartibartfast:"Is that your robot?"
Marvin:"No, I'm mine."
I am honestly surprised at how few geeks actually use VNC and/or VPN on their personal setups. I can understand an average computer user skipping this, but not someone who considers themselves a power-user. It's so simple, and you get instant access to your files from any computer in the world. Even better, you get instant access to your COMPUTER from anywhere in the world. Software with single-user licenses is not a problem.
;)
Lag can be a bitch sometimes, but honestly, MS Office over RealVNC is far better than Google Docs. Hell, I play TF2 from the other side of the United States. At least then you have an excuse for lagging
I suspect that most people will actually use a mixture of desktop and web software for quite some time. Currently I use Gmail, and Google Calendar as my mail and calendar programs, and still use Open Office for my word processor (I much prefer it to Word), and Excel as my spreadsheet program (I much prefer it to Open Office one). I also use Google Docs and spreadsheets for certain things - like jotting down notes when I'm visiting clients so that I can have access to them from anywhere. It has to be said though that in Enterprise applications, which is what I spend most of my time building, desktop applications are becoming a rarity. To a great extent I think the only reason we all still use things like Word and Excel is because we're so used to using them.
..besides MS Office and Open Office.
There's download managers, PaintShop et al, Acrobat, disc label designers, all kinds of apps with graphical interfaces that you simply cannot achieve online without a complete rethink of what HTML does in your browser.
Either that, we'd end up with a variety of propriety browser plugins or thin client apps to give us the interface required for the online software in question.
Either way, you still need a desktop you can install stuff on. I can't see how to get away from that, or even why we'd need to if someone somewhere didn't see a revenue model in it.
How come no one is talking about the possibility of a third solution? With USB drives exploding in size and all the efforts out there to create Linux bootable thumb drives how long will it be before someone can carry everything they need on a thumb drive in their pocket - including the OS.
I'd like to see a hardware manufacturer start installing empty hardware with USB - I could walk up to it boot up with my drive, do my work, and walk away with it.
Aside from the need to backing up and the possibility of dropping the drive down a storm drain, I think this is a nice third choice between the Google/MS wars.
Okay, so let's say I drop gmail and stop using google. What about all the other products I buy that send money to China? Something like 80% of the goods in Wal-Mart are made in China. All I'm wearing from China at the second is a pair of shoes and maybe the watch (Timex, but doesn't say origin on the back). But I know that many of my clothes are made in Malaysia, the Philippines, India, etc, and I have no idea what labor or environmental practices are behind these products. Let's not even start on my computer, mp3 player, dvd player, LCD TV, and so on. Plus I spend about $230 a month on gasoline, much of which which goes to large oil companies and Wahaabi fundamentalists, neither of which embody moral values I'm happy with.
How do you go about delineating which areas of your shopping life can be seen in a moral context? I know many people who are horrified at even adult prostitution in Thailand, but sweatshop workers working 14-hr days at 13 cents a shirt doesn't cause their moral compass to even tremble. How is that? Why don't I see exposes on the people worked to death in the sugar-cane fields to get the sugar to go into my coffee, or the people killed in Guatemala by thugs financed via the bananas that go into my banana pudding? How do you choose?
Again, I'm not saying that you're wrong, and I'm not even challenging you to defend yourself. My question is largely rhetorical. I consider myself personally complicit in a very wide variety of daily atrocities. If you watch the documentary The Corporation you'll find that it is the corporte entity itself, not just Microsoft or Google (or even Haliburton) that is evil, or at best sociopathic. What's more, the moral problems are so widespread that you'd be hard pressed to live a morally uncompromised life as a modern consumer.
You could, I guess, wander off and live off the land, but I doubt many of us could manage that. The compass in my backpack is made of plastic dependent on the entire petroleum industry and all that it entails. Eyeglasses as well. My jeans, underwear, socks, and shirt could've been made in sweatshops (though I hope they weren't). My shoes--China. This whole "do no evil" thing isn't easy to live up to. I'm certainly an abject failure at it.
This is a preliminary doc that explains why they did what they did:
2007 Office System Document: Developer Overview of the User Interface
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5ae8ea78-6ba9-4de4-aabd-2616d010caa7&displaylang=en
I feel a LOT better about the ribbon now that I've read this. Office 2007 seems to be a so-so implementation of some really clever UI concepts.
I work for a Windows development shop, and we've decided to use the ribbon for our UI redesign. It addresses some of our biggest goals quite handily.
Does this make me evil...?
FIXME: Add a sig here
Sorry, I'm not buzzword compliant. I really don't know what the heck " specific business needs" are. I would think that they might involve collaboration amongst groups of widely distributed mobile people working on a common task. Or something like that.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Just before you and others start posting about the tyranny of Google. :)
Weez all noes teh MiKKKr0$$$l0th is teh EVIL!!!!111!1!, n dat duh Googel is duh not be duh 3vil.
Soze wats duh problum? Weez truss duh Googel, n dey uzez duh Lunix, to!!
DUH GOOGEL IS DUH N0T BE DUH EVIL!!!!
I think the article points out the fundamental differences between Microsoft and Google. Style-wise: Microsoft competes -- Google innovates. Tool-wise: Microsoft uses the OS and the Office Suite -- Google uses the browser and the Google-plex (its version of the "cloud"). Microsoft hopes that its monopoly products (Windows and Office) and its competitiveness can be used to successfully control innovation. Google hopes that the velocity of its innovation into the Google-plex will be such as to leave Microsoft in its dust. So I believe Google when it says its not competing with Microsoft. It would have to slow down, change direction, and fight to do so. That would be a big mistake. It is not a fighting company and its products don't make for good weapons. There is only one thing Google can do to live -- run. Run to a place where Microsoft can't compete.
The sole test of knowledge is experiment. -- R. Feynman
Google also gets access to YOUR mail, from anywhere in the world, all for free.
I didn't notice any buzzwords in "specific business needs".
Business software that is general in usefulness is justified in being written as a web-app. Now think of the opposite.
Ok good point. There aren't any buzz words, I just meant I'm not familiar with your problem space. I think what you might have meant is something more understandable ( to me at least) such as " web apps are good at solving some problems, but not all". I don't think the generality of an application makes a difference, but I'm not sure our terminology is close enough to really agree on anything.
Its a good thing you're not trying to sell me anything or visa versa.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
MicroSoft tried to co-opt TCP/IP by putting special MicoSoft code in it, or completely replacing it. MSN was supposed to crush AOL (just dialup in early 1990s) and replace the internet.
Then Bill had a "Damascus" insight after one of his retreats and decided to join the InterNet rather than replace it. His main weapon- free InterNet Explorer- pretty much banrupted Netscape, the Google/Facebook phenom of ite era.
To spell it out : it is expensive to produce a web app compared to a desktop app, so if you don't need the advantage of no installation and universal access (or near enough), which is almost always the case for internal projects (specific business needs), then save yourself a ton of money and use VB or Java or Delphi or MFC.
There's an old saying in Tennessee, I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee ... that says fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me...you can't get fooled again.
You know what I'd like to see? Some kind of hybrid Apple iDisk with syncing, (only available on Mac hardware currently) and Google Apps. You could work with local copies, or remote via web app, and either would get synced up. No change in workflow for using local office applications, and you'd always have some way of editing/creating documents remotely, which is better than nothing. Google apps couldn't access my iDisk via WebDAV last time I checked though, and it's very inconvenient to manually download/upload files between the two systems. I don't know why Google didn't think of that, unless they really want us to use only their storage for some devious purpose.
It may not be the most popular idea here, with webapps being a supplement rather than a replacement for office docs, but I think it's the most realistic. It could still save some people from buying expensive software licenses to occasionally open work files at home, but I suspect most people already pirate copies of Office from work for that anyway. This kind of reminds me of OWA & Outlook actually.. but for the rest of office.. and plain old filesystem instead of a database.. and storage synchronization/access being entirely independent of the applications using it. Actually, it's a bit closer how GMail & mail clients work together, but bidirectional, and with files, not mail. Ah, you get it...
If generic iDisk-like software were available, and web-apps could directly access other forms of online storage (a blindingly obvious requirement, IMHO) this silly online vs. offline office argument would disappear. We could move on to more important discussions like webapp G vs. webapp M and online storage A vs. online storage G.
Now that is interesting. Thanks for explaining what you meant. For any project, you have to take a look at what technologies make sense to use to meet the requirements. It might make sense to use a web app internally, it might not. It might be more expensive, it might not. There are too many variables to state a priori what will be the best even for "specific business needs". IMHO. You could be right, I've worked on both. Web seems to be the way to go for the types of problems I've run into, dealing with small/medium sized companies.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
way, still.
.NET.
I love how we hack and hack and add new javascript APIs, try to get browsers to support new things that force users to upgrade to use, all to get a feature we had available in a desktop app 10 years ago (see AJAX or... Multithreading or... damn, a simple table where you can modify data like excel). Then, when it has a problem, it's even harder to debug than that same old desktop feature.
I love sessions and requests too, they are a dream to deal with.
A combination of those is superior, like Java webstart (full blown local app that automatically updates itself from the web) or what MS named their version they added 5 years later in
If you don't get my point, it's ok.
Well, there are some desktop dev frameworks that might be even slower than web app development; particularly thinking of MFC and Java.
The need to boot up a machine is not really necessary, just make a universal virtualization host that you can load your 'thumb drive OS' on and skip the wait for hardware boot up. Alternatively, have a virtual machine for any major OS that you might run on top of (Mac/Windows/Linux/BSD/etc) and then your private OS runs inside the virtual host. Almost perfect portability and the ability to run a completely customized environment pretty much anywhere.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.