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Microsoft vs. Google — Mutually Assured Destruction
jmcbain writes "Robert X. Cringely asserts that nothing good will come out of the ongoing war between Microsoft and Google: 'The battle between Microsoft and Google entered a new phase last week with the announcement of Google's Chrome Operating System — a direct attack on Microsoft Windows. This is all heady stuff and good for lots of press, but in the end none of this is likely to make a real difference for either company or, indeed, for consumers. It's just noise — a form of mutually assured destruction intended to keep each company in check.'"
Sure, consumers won't care at first, but the fact that Chrome OS is open source will have, in my opinion, a long term impact on the industry and thus eventually the consumers. Sorry, I would bet Cringely is wrong on that one.
Animoog.org
honestly, i dont know whether if he is. he surely sounds like one.
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Robert Hansen found a flaw in the first day of using it that Chrome allows Javascript to run in View Source, meaning you can't check potentially harmful pages without Javascript running off. Didn't Chrome market itself as the most secure browser? Anyway IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera all caught this, yet Google missed it with Chrome. I'm sure their new operating system will have tons of neat features just like their browser, but will they miss out on the security end again while boasting they are the most secure? I'll still with my Ubuntu and Firefox for now thank you and avoid both Microsoft and Googles security flaws.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Jesus.
This is like bad science fiction, written before the internet was invented - by Dan Brown. Cringely is such a tool.
If you think companies don't diversify, you are horribly mistaken.
Do you think that Kraft foods only makes cheese for example? Companies diversify into similar fields.
From a consumer point of view you are dead correct in that you are oblivious to the other dealings of many companies. MS makes money from things other than windows and office. Lots of other things. If that was all they did, they'd go broke. They make money off programming deals, etc. The closest thing to say about MS and google is: they both profit from software, internet, and hardware. Thus isn't not even expanding their capability, just more work in a field they already work in.
MS attempts at search have been horrible as they haven't improved anything and have been using them to hide data (look up situations involving bing on that - search anything that is negative about MS). I'm not saying google's attempts at an OS are going to be 100 % successful (as nobody can predict the future with an uneducated guess), but android is optimized for ARM, so it actually makes sense to create a separate OS. Plus, they have a ton of programmers?
Wow, when MS said they had something to announce monday, I didn't think it'd be an article full of spin.
Chrome OS fills a number of needs. Whether these turn out to be the needs of end-users remains to be seen, but Chrome OS is not just some industry giants engaging in a slanging match:
1. Chrome OS will help segment Atom from Pentium and Core. That's a pretty big need right there, for Intel, anyway.
2. It could fill a not-yet-filled void: There is a very good chance Chrome will end up dominating netbook Linux the way Android is on the way to dominating handset Linux. Android is a really nice system, and deserves to win versus most other mobile Linux alternatives. Android is accelerating the use of Linux in handsets. Chrome might be that much better than other netbook Linuxes that it, too, ends up dominating and expanding it's market segment.
3. OEMs have been porting Android to devices that may not be the best match for Android. Chrome OS is a better answer than diluting or de-focusing Android to make it a more universal OS.
4. It completes the strategic picture for GWT, Gears, and Chrome: Google has a multi-layered strategy to make their applications run on any OS and any browser. If GWT and Gears on IE on Windows 7 are one end of the spectrum, Chrome OS is the other end. Microsoft has an OS platform where they can integrate search and the cloud and local applications. Now Google does, too.
I would not be surprised to see an Android application runtime on Chrome OS, alongside the browser/JavaScript runtime.
I wrote parts of this stuff
Yes there are competing products but most do not gain much (commercial) traction. Most companies don't gain much outside of their core businesses. And it is hard to come with a product that really can compete and dethrone a firmly entrenched player.
However there are exceptions.
A new browser came out, finally settled on the name "FireFox", and in a few years time got like 30% of the market.
A new mobile phone came out of a company that had never ventured in the mobile phone market before, got a lot of hype, and now is the reference to which all other phones are compared. This is Apple's iPhone of course.
Asus' EEEPC came out and virtually overnight created a new market, and now every manufacturer wants to have a cheap netbook on the market, in the 10" size range.
So there are more examples. Google itself is one: without any advertising it became the de-facto standard for searching, the name even became even a verb.
Who knows what this GoogleOS will do. Maybe it is really that much better than Windows. Google has the media attention already, that helps a lot to at least attract publicity. We are all expecting ARM processor based netbooks soon (prototypes have been demoed already), and Windows simply does not run on that processor. Whether ARM based netbooks/notebooks with GoogleOS or some Linux distro (e.g. NetBuntu) will make it remains to be seen. It would surprise me if it really makes a big impact on the market, though it would make things very interesting if it does.
Ahh, there I said it. It feels good to say it.
He's the broken clock of pundits, he's right twice a day, but only by accident.
The problem with Google vs Microsoft is that Google should have made this move 6 years ago and it would have been in place to capitalize on the fiasco that is/was Vista.
The advantage Google has over, say, Canonical with Ubuntu, ls that everyone knows who Google is, sheesh, its used as a verb. Google docs is getting some uptake in smaller companies. OpenOffice is getting some uptake in others. The economy is helping the lower cost alternatives. People with skills are losing jobs and turning to lower cost or free alternatives in order to make money contracting.
Google can deal with Intuit, Adobe, and others to get their apps ported to Linux.
Google has the resources to make it happen. To beat Microsoft on the desktop market. The question is will they?
"do no evil" appears in practice to mean "don't actively do evil, but if it just sorta happens, well, shit eh."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
What's so bad about the emergence of "free crap?" Gmail, Google Earth, Bing, Hulu, Google Docs are all pretty solid services considering the price tag...
Well, I did read the article, and I have to say it didn't exactly meet high standards of analytical brilliance.
There's a very simple reason for Microsoft to try search business away from Google. If Google makes money at it, then so can Microsoft.
On the other hand, the idea that Google's Chrome OS is going to be a threat to MS Windows on the desktop anytime soon is fantasy. Think about Android. Android is a fascinating OS, but it hasn't taken the phone world by storm -- yet.
I think that Google may be more interested in defining the capabilities of classes of devices. The thing about laptops and desktops is that the platform vendor is not in the capability limiting business. On a mobile phone, it is, because people don't pay for most of their phones. The carriers do, and the carriers are interested in things like lock-in and preventing competition with network services by software using generic network services. Android, I think, is an attempt to liberalize controls on what mobile devices can do.
Likewise in the great spectrum auction, Google tried to leverage their participation into a change of the auction's rules.
So, putting on my wildass speculation hat for a moment, I am lead to wonder whether the Chrome operating system is an attempt to alter the course of the netbook space away from devices that are artificially constrained, and possibly which tie users to specific networks and service providers. One can imagine a version of Windows for netbooks carefully constrained so it doesn't undermine the main Windows product, and which tries to funnel users toward Bing. Given Microsoft's clout with manufacturers, they could well launch such a device. It could be sold at very low margins from Microsoft's perspective because it would generate a regular revenue stream.
That kind of closed world is bad for Google. It doesn't have to take the world by storm with these offerings, it just has to tip developments in the right places to keep the world open. A straight-jacketed version of Windows XP that funnels users to MS services but is cheap to put on a netbook might seem like a good deal to a manufacturer, but not if they have to put their systems up against a more open one.
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