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Ray Ozzie Calls Google Wave "Anti-Web"
TropicalCoder writes "Ray Ozzie says that Google Wave is 'anti-Web,' by which he seems to mean that it is too complex for its own good. In the video he complains about its complexity in relation to Microsoft's Live Mesh: 'If you have something, that by its very nature is very complex, with many goals... then you need open source to have many instances of it because nobody will be able to do an independent implementation of it.' That's its weakness to Ozzie, apparently — that this complexity that can only be overcome by open source. While he heaps high praise on the Google team that came up with this, he feels that the advantage of Microsoft's approach is that '...by decomposing things to be simpler, you don't need open source.' The Register's author summarizes it like this: 'In a way, this is classic Microsoft meets what is emerging as classic Google. Microsoft gives you an integrated stack but all the moving parts are anchored on a single company's vision. Google frees you to work out the bits yourself, but you must rely on your own smarts or those of your chosen tools.'"
This will become a truism in future times: software is the expression of a social intelligence and the more people are involved, the better that works. FOSS is simply better at solving complex problems (like "how to build an operating system") than closed source development.
Ironically, while Google depends on FOSS for its most innovative attacks on Microsoft (Android, for example, which has leapt over WinCE and Symbian with what appears little effort), Google keeps its most valuable technology (searching) completely closed.
Thus, one can conclude that this is also Google's long term weakness. Microsoft: if you want to beat Google, find a way to develop a completely open search ranking system.
My blog
As the guy who designed Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie has no credit with me about complaining about complexity. What is Lotus Notes? Is it a database? Email system? Application development platform? How about all that and more! A good friend of mine was a Lotus Notes developer back in the day said "Lotus Notes is everything you want and need from now to the end of time, and it's all available to you right now."
That is not the hallmark of simplicity.
ray ozzie tells the world that we should take wave seriously
if ray ozzie had ignored wave, then he would have implicitly communicated it would be safe for everyone else to ignore wave
by throwing a hissy fit over wave, ray ozzie is telling all of us that wave has real potential
google should cut ray ozzie a check for the free PR and advertising
when will people learn that there is no such thing as bad press? all exposure, positive or negative, is good exposure. that's why attempts at censorship often backfire (see: streisand effect)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Summery seems a little bias, imo.
I have a hard time being sure whether it's biased. Personally, I read that Google Wave is the "Anti-Web" and I thought, "Sounds cool. Does that mean it fixes all the dumb stuff about the web? Or... wait, is 'anti-web' a bad thing?"
I read, "If you have something, that by its very nature is very complex, with many goals... then you need open source to have many instances of it because nobody will be able to do an independent implementation of it," and I thought, "Yeah, isn't open source awesome? It can accomplish things that are really too complex for a proprietary vendor, but it can still work out because lots of different people can work together on the solution!" And then I thought, "Er... wait, or is that supposed to be a bad thing?"
I couldn't really tell if it was praise or criticism until I looked up who Ray Ozzie was, and then I knew it was supposed to be criticism. To my ears, that Microsoft's approach doesn't require things to be open source really only sounds like an advantage for Microsoft, not for the users or developers who might be interested in the products.