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Microsoft vs. Google — Mutually Assured Destruction

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the pieces-are-everywhere dept.

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.'"

3 of 416 comments (clear)

  1. Cringe-worthy analysis by Renderer+of+Evil · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, has to fear more than anything else is that he'll awake one day to learn that the Google search engine suddenly doesn't work on any Windows computers: something happened overnight and what worked yesterday doesn't work today. It would have to be an act of deliberate sabotage on Microsoft's part and blatantly illegal, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. Microsoft would claim ignorance and innocence and take days, weeks or months to reverse the effect, during which time Google would have lost billions.

    Jesus.

    This is like bad science fiction, written before the internet was invented - by Dan Brown. Cringely is such a tool.

  2. CRINGELY is an Idiot by mlwmohawk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  3. Re:First Nuclear Weapon Equipped Post by pin0chet · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...