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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.'"
Microsoft praised on the altar of Slashdot!? Blasphemy!
This just in: Microsoft employee claims that Microsoft tool is the best and their closed-source approach is the only way to go.
Things that people from Microsoft say about both open source and google are often very stupid, and this bit from Mr. Ozzie is no exception.
I have an aversion to video, so unfortunately I cannot comment on the rest.
Juln
So I was wondering who Ray Ozzie is, and how about that, he's a software architect for Microsoft. Of course he's going to praise Microsoft's software, no? Summery seems a little bias, imo.
Wave is a total ripoff of Sharepoint, which is a ripoff of Notes and other collaboration software.
If Ozzie really wanted to criticize Google, he should have gone after their unoriginality. Then again, such a criticism may bite him back.
The basic problem these days is that you have many people who want to have access to a shared document. The solution that Microsoft was pursuing was good, and attempted to fit the RSS model blogs use to push content. But in the end you still have many copies of documents, and you're always trying to keep changes synced across them. This approach breaks down when you have multiple sources of change... conflict resolution will always jump up to bite you.
Google Wave is a brilliant leapfrog over this problem, at the cost of some complexity. They made engineering choices that so far seem to be very pragmatic and practical... and if you don't like them you could always build your own. They actually distribute the changes to all observers, using OT (Operational Transforms) to keep everything synchronized. As a benefit, you can work on only the changes to a document, instead of having to re-scan the whole thing every time something changes, to attempt to work backwards to figure out the changes.
The ambition of Google's approach is backed up with a brilliant exploration of the solution space, and a very good choice of models, both in terms of the open source approach, in their openness with documentation, etc... and their choice of federation as a first class part of the model.
The latest analogy that I came up with is one of a Jet Engine.... instead of working on one charge of fuel/air at a time (one document)... it operates on a stream of fuel and air.... which allows for higher performance (at the cost of some fuel efficiency).
We don't care as much about the computational cycles as we do all the human time this saves by tracking all the changes, and who made them.
Bravo, Google... you've done it again!
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
Shhaaaaaaron!
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.
In other News, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer issued a joint statement saying "in their independent opinion as leading figures in the software industry, Live Mesh kicks Wave's ass."
This allows you to share a document and make multiple simultaneous changes, providing a structure to do so all the way up and down... this framework gives you a standard way to do things, that can then be expanded upon in a whole new set of ways.
Yes... this stuff could be done in a web forum... just like you could program everything in assembler... but it's more efficient in many ways to spend a little CPU time to make up for hours of developer time.
This framework will allow others to reach much, much farther and do things you can't even imagine doing via php/javascript.
How about:
"Well I am fully vested and have just cashed out. I must say we suck, I mean we are STILL playing catchup on the web and can't put together a clean OS architecture. In fact, The only was we could improve is if you all went to goggle and we had to really think about what we do to compete.
Well, good night, and Steve? I bolted the chairs down."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Where in Google's presentation did they say that implementations had to all be open source? They simply said they'd supply some of their own code and the documentation for the protocols to allow other people to implement their solutions. They never said all the other people had to open source their versions.
He's right as far as he goes, it's just that he doesn't go far enough. Google tends to open up their APIs and say to the developer world "Go play with this", Microsoft chooses not to take that risk (and yeah, it is a risk) and keeps a tighter lid on their software. It is absolutely true that this gives Microsoft more control over their brand image and software.
Where he stops short, however, is not looking at the final results. He just doesn't get that open source and open APIs work. Letting the developer world play with your product produces dozens of ideas that would never have occurred to the people who created it in the first place. That's what Microsoft has never understood.
Lotus Notes = Ray Ozzie
if this man is speaking, I am not listening
But It's Not Google
Insightful and funny are really the same thing, except one has a punch line.
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
If you just want to run a standalone web forum, then Google Wave may not offer much more than a ajax php forum. And if you just want email, then SMTP+IMAP/POP is surely good enough.
The power of Google Wave comes from the unification of various communication and collaboration paradigms, it's federated nature, it's extensibility and it's open-standard and web-centric approach. In the old model if I want to participate in a forum I'll have to register on the web, go back to my outlook to get the verification email, and then go back to web. I'll also have to subscribe to email alerts for new posts, then go back to the web to reply. All these context switching is totally unnecessary and can be frustrating when you have say 10 different web forums, 5 social networks, 3 photo sharing sites, and 2 IM networks and 1 blog. And there is no practical way to for me to search and browse through my entire communication history in one place.
So I was wondering who Ray Ozzie is, and how about that, he's a software architect for Microsoft.
Ray Ozzie is the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft. He replaced Bill Gates as the person who drives Microsoft's technological decisions.
Live Mesh is Ray's brainchild. Why is it important to listen to what Ray says? Because he directs the future of Microsoft's development in the space. He controls billions of Microsoft dollars. The point is that he's not some random Microsoft shill - he's the guy in charge.
Yes, Google Wave does not immediately offer any new features, but it does simplify many of those things. It is actually very similar to e-mail as it is a decentralized system for storing and transmitting data, except it is designed to be real-time, support threading/discussions easily, and embed various types of applications and rich data easily. This essientially raises an e-mail/IM medium such that it can be used instead of web for simple uses. IM is not suitable because, unlike e-mail and Wave, it does not persist on the server -- and I think the interesting applications of Wave rely on the persistance, not real-time communication.
Consider that currently services like Flickr/Picasa are often used to e-mail photos to people because e-mail/IM as it is currently implemented is practically unuseable for that application. In Wave, you could just put the photos into a wave, include an AJAXy photo gallery gadget to make it pretty, and invite whoever you wanted to see it -- and they could easily comment on the photos, etc. A blog is even easier as it is just text.
As the actual "application" there is part of the message, the server only has to be a normal Wave server, running no special software itself. Therefore, this makes it far easier to publish information on the internet without relying on a specific party to host the data/application for you.
captcha: detach (from overly-centralized web-based systems)
An ajax web app that tries to ape a simple desktop app is built with:
HTTP
HTML
CSS
XML
SQL
JavaScript
PHP/Python/Ruby/other scripting language
That's 7 different text-based (aka "simple") languages/syntaxes a developer has to learn just to be able just to get the same basic functionality as a simple desktop application. The current system as it is isn't simple.
I was showing a Linux user Live Mesh today - and I've got to say it's shaping up to be a really impressive 'something'. Not quite sure what it is, but it's impressive. 5 gig syncing across my desktop PC, laptop, home server, work PC, and mobile phone. So it's a cloud storage thingy, I hear you cry. Ah ha, but it also has built-in remote desktop. And you can invite other people to have access to your remotely shared files.
So... it's syncing cloud storage, and a remote control system thrown in. Maybe I don't get its place in the Universe, but there's no denying the technology works well.
This is me commenting on the technology I know about - not used Wave, but it read as a heck of a technology, on paper. I'd be very interested to get my hands on it.
When Gmail first launched, they did not support POP3 or IMAP. (no other web provider did either, for that matter) Today, they do.
Because this will be an open protocol (GWFP on XMPP), somebody will eventually develop a client protocol, or (preferably) extend the federated protocol to the client level. If it's any good, Google will eventually implement it. Right now, Google is stuck on Web 2.0 and HTML 5. (and cloud computing?) I think they can be broken free from that, it just takes some presure on a case-by-case basis.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I mean, it is distributed and decentralised, which is the antithesis of what the WWW is about.
What planet did you grow up on? The "World Wide Web" is comprised of a decentralized, distributed (worldwide) set of computers running web servers owned and controlled by myriad companies and individuals (more specifically, the web pages and hyperlinks). You seem to understand that there is a difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet, but cannot grasp that the "www" part of the equation is thoroughly distributed and decentralized?
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
No, no, no, Microsoft turns to Open Source for recursive acronyms now:
Bing Is Not Google
News about the Kettle Open Source project: on my blog
I mean, this guy goes around promoting himself as the next big thing for making a web site that no one's really heard of, and, as Microsoft's "internet genius", he's pretty much sucked. The company is running around in circles, has kinda blown its client. I mean Bill Gates's Active Desktop had more, well originality than anything that's come out of MS since then. At least it was an interesting concept, even if it couldn't quite work. What do we have now? Stuff that's not even really interesting.
This is my sig.
You have to understand. Microsoft has no idea what it's supposed to do either. It's just supposed to compete with Wave.
It's different things to different people. And if any of them manage to pony up some cash for it, then Microsoft will make it do what they want it to do.
This is typical. Nearly every application from Internet Explorer to PocketPC started out as a completely non-functional response to a successful competitor, an empty husk with a snazzy name and lots of marketing dollars. Why do you think we're seeing this on Slashdot, really? I mean, you don't find it coincidental that Microsoft has a never-ending stream of new products waiting in the wings, ready to announce mere weeks after any of it's competitors announce something similar?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"