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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?
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.
But some of us still like the desktop. My ideal world has me keeping all my data on my computer yet synchronized between my desktop and laptop. So far I haven't found that world but some things have gotten close. Microsoft does a pretty good job of keeping things organized locally, but some of what I need it doesn't handle too well (RSS reader in Outlook is quirky at best, etc). Google has some great online products - I love gmail and google reader - but I want to keep things with me, something more than google gears. iMap for gmail solved that one, but a good, synchronizable RSS reader is still somewhere in dreamworld. As for docs, various sync programs work. Google Docs and other online word processors simply are not an option. Despite what the critics say Word 2007 is a great product and no online product comes close, plus none of them travel with me (I'm aware of upcoming solutions using Google Gears but I still prefer the power of Word 2007).
.Mac almost gets my synchronization taken care of. There are several quirks in Mac that I'm trying to figure out, but it might end up being my solution. I'll lose Word 2007, but there are decent enough options on the Mac. We'll see.
Just recently I've started playing with a Mac and so far I'm pleased with what it can do.
All that to say, Google is decidedly not making the desktop moot. I'm sure there are quite a few people out there like me who prefer managing and storing information locally.
I love my sig.
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
The desktop monopoly gave them the billions of dollars needed to enter a market, sell units at a loss, and buy developers to write games for their platform.
You probably could have come up with that if you'd given it a half second's thought.
... 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.
I don't know what size organization you have, but mine is small. I can tell you that the economics of developing anything in-house are quickly shifting to prohibitive. For the applications that we have deployed recently, it was cheaper to just have the vendor host the data rather than build out our own infrastructure and host it ourselves. It's true that when our connection has a problem, we're dead in the water, but compared to the cost of staff to maintain the infrastructure and applications, it is negligible.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
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
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.
Every attempt of Microsoft to find a new and profitable business has relied upon leveraging Microsoft's desktop monopoly.
Oh yeah, that explains the success of Microsoft Games and Microsoft Hardware in a nutshell. Oh wait no it doesn't... I seem to have no problems at all playing my Xbox 360 or using my Microsoft-branded keyboard on my Apple G5 computer.
(Christ, do you people engage your brains for even a fraction of a second before modding BS like this up?)
Comment of the year
You forget Apple. Apple has something that MS and Google do not have. Wide consumer presence. Most people who are not computer savvy may not know Google or Linux but they probably know of Apple through the iPod and iPhone. They probably know that Apple makes computers even if they have never used one. While Macs don't have a huge market share compared to PCs, their numbers are growing. In consumer products like the iPod and iPhone, Apple is destroying Microsoft. With Apple, Microsoft has a competitor on another front.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.