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.'"

Comments

First Nuclear Weapon Equipped Post

[billstewart]

Kaboom!

Re:First Nuclear Weapon Equipped Post

[pin0chet]

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...

Dear Mr Cringley

[linumax]

The phenomenon you are witnessing is also known as competition in some circles. It has been known to exist in the world of business for a very very long time.

Re:Dear Mr Cringley

[jmyers]

Of course if you read the article, I know it is a lot to ask, you will find that he is not talking about competition. For the very short summary.

MS Makes money from Windows and Office.
Google makes money from search based advertising.
Nothing else really matters to either company.

MS attempts at the search ad market and Google's attempts are the OS market are not intended to succeed. They are just the corporate equivalent or "be nice to me or I will fuck your girlfriend". Both side know the other has no chance, but the media loves to talk about it.

Re:Dear Mr Cringley

[Anonymous Coward]

why?

why cant google create a successful operating system? would it be so out of the realm of possibility to see "google os" displayed alongside microsoft windows, in shrink-wrap packaging, at your local best buy? and perhaps significantly cheaper, and catering to a certain market who do not require Office but simply internet access with a few applications?

Re:Dear Mr Cringley

[scubamage]

What is this commie liberal pinko "competition" bs. This is the United States of America. Everyone knows that capitalism works by litigating your competitors into oblivion, not by creating better products and services. Why, just look at the telephone, cable, satellite, and **AA providers.

Re:Dear Mr Cringley

[ajs]

Of course if you read the article, I know it is a lot to ask, you will find that he is not talking about competition.

Of course not. This is Robert X. Cringely. He's talking about "war ... destruction ... horrible nasty ... look at the bones!"

He's a loud, but relatively uninsightful prognosticator of tech markets. Nothing to see here.

More to the point, he's wrong. Microsoft and Google aren't involved in a "war", they're involved in a re-alignment of the market. Google is attempting to assert that the market for operating systems is so moot that there's no longer a value in productizing the OS itself so much as the service of maintaining it. Microsoft is asserting that "uhh... we can do search just as well as Google did 5 years ago. So there."

Feel free to select your "winner" in this non-war.

Re:Dear Mr Cringley

[AKAImBatman]

It's not that Google can't or couldn't create a successful operating system... it's that for the vast majority of Windows users, they're not going to switch OS's.

If there's anything I've learned from the current browser war, it's that the best way to take down Microsoft is not another monopoly, but healthy competition.

i.e. FireFox has done a bang-up job in being a strong competitor to Internet Explorer. Yet it remained fairly niche until Safari, Opera, and Chrome all worked there way into people's lives.
They're all still niches in of themselves, but they add up to a whole that presents a serious competition to Microsoft. Worse yet, they've captured enough marketshare to where the idea of IE being the "only option" has mostly gone the way of the dodo.

Competition for Windows will need to be the same. No one Operating System will dethrone it. Not Linux, not OS X, not Google Chrome OS. But together, in competition, they can become more than the sum of their parts.

Re:Dear Mr Cringley

[Shakrai]

Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?
It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.

M.A.D.

[Gerafix]

The only way to win is... CTRL+ALT+DELETE

Re:M.A.D.

[mu51c10rd]

The only way to win is... to not install either OS?

It's dirty software I tells you dagnabbit!

[Drakkenmensch]

Edison used to say that Tesla's newfangled alternating current was dangerous, unstable and just plain dirty electricity. I guess that's why a hundred years later, we don't use it anymo- oh wait.

Competition

[wisnoskij]

How is competition between brands not good for the customer?

Mutually Assured Destruction? I think not...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the author of the summary understands the meaning of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

If the MAD policy were in effect and "shots" were being fired, both companies would fall...

If by MAD the author presumes that Google will somehow be able to use its operating system as an assault on Windows, that would also assume that Microsoft could/would use Windows as an assault on Google AND since Google cannot reciprocate in kind, Microsoft would somehow have the ability to kill off Google currently. The day Microsoft hardcodes into Windows the inability to access Google, that'll be the day Microsoft Windows officially begins its death spiral...

I just don't see this analogy making sense...

Re:Mutually Assured Destruction? I think not...

[Andr T.]

Me neither.

What Google s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, has to fear more than anything else is that heâ(TM)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 doesnâ(TM)t work today. It would have to be an act of deliberate sabotage on Microsoft s part and blatantly illegal, but that doesnâ(TM)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.

Does he _really_ think Microsoft would do that? How? Some intentionally broken windows update? If they really could do that (and I don't think it's possible in any way), and if they really did that, then:

1 - Google and people all around the world would figure out ways of making google work again in any Windows computer.

2 - Microsoft would drown itself in legal issues in no time.

Re:Mutually Assured Destruction? I think not...

[spyrochaete]

In the conclusion of the article the author talks about how Google and Microsoft will not defeat each other, but some third player will storm in with innovative new ideas and steal the show. It's more like Mutually Assured Distraction in that they will be blindsided by some up-and-comer who is more in tune with what end users really need.

Re:Mutually Assured Destruction? I think not...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Even if they pulled it off, breaking into an OS market dominated by a single player with a huge entrenched base of applications is hard, and even Google may find it more trouble than it's worth. Google may seem huge and unstoppable, but even they have their limits.

The idea is not really get a huge market share on corporate sector. It is just to play havoc with Microsoft's standard strategy of forcing upgrades, changing file formats to continue the vendor lock etc. Once Firefox got just 10% market share the web sites started coding for the standards and stopped special hacks for IE and IE's market share came tumbling down.

Once ChromeOS establishes a net presence and demands interoperability with ExchangeServer, ExchangeServer will have to become standard compliant. iPhone could do that, but Apple is more likely to make a deal with Microsoft and get a special closed API support from MSFT leaving others to lurch.

Once google docs, and other office replacements reach a market share of about 10%, and they interact with some 10% of the established MsOffice users and demand compatibility and interoperability, maintaining vendor lock by the traditional methods of API changes, file format changes, mysterious bugs that affect others but not Microsoft etc would not fly.

When Microsoft products follow open standards and are interoperable, the profit margins will shrink. That is the only way for Google to survive. As long as Microsoft has cash cows, it will be able undercut competition drive them out of business and resume business as usual. That is the threat Google is fighting off.

And Bing...?

[openfrog]

Are not Ballmer intentions to destroy Google notorious ("I will fucking kill them")?

Why should launching a Web OS for netbooks be considered a declaration of war, while launching a search engine (Bing) be considered business as usual?

As another poster wrote, this is called competition and let the better OS win.

Re:I hope Microsoft gets stuffed by Google

[DavidR1991]

A monopoly is not just the lack of substitute (or competing) goods - it's about the lack of viable competing goods. So in this case, MS still fits the bill (e.g. Being the most popular platform, and with the win32 API being very heavily embedded in many products, targeting Windows is the only viable option for a lot of companies. It doesn't necessarily mean it's the only one)

How riduculous

[oodaloop]

FTFA:

The vast majority of Google searches are, of course, done on PCs running Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. It is not in Googleâ(TM)s real interest to displace these products, which have facilitated so much of its success.

So Google doesn't make money from people running other OS's? Google ads don't appear in my browser when I'm running Ubuntu? Would the Google Chrome OS or browser presumably block its own ads? Now I understand why this has the tag diecringleydie.

Re:not good?

[Chyeld]

Oh, please. Google OS is a glorified web browser tailored to netbooks. It won't even make a scratch on Windows' entrenchment in the desktop market.

Today...

Cringe-worthy analysis

[Renderer of Evil]

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.

Chrome OS Direct Attack on Windows

[Junior J. Junior III]

Here's what would be a "direct attack" on Windows:

Attempting to hack into Microsoft's corporate intranet and delete the source code and documentation for Windows.
Releasing into the wild malware that targets windows installed base and destroys systems that run Windows.

Taking on a project to come up with your own operating system isn't an attack on Windows. It's competition. Windows doesn't have any inherent right to its marketshare.

Re:not good?

[clang_jangle]

Oh, please. Google OS is a glorified web browser tailored to netbooks. It won't even make a scratch on Windows' entrenchment in the desktop market.

Considering the huge number of users who know nothing but how to use a web browser, I think you're quite mistaken. I think it's very likely that Chrome OS will replace Windows for most non-geek consumers -- and because it's going to be open source, a lot of geeks will probably adopt it too.

That's just crazy talk.

[tjstork]

If it wasn't for Google Chrome and Firefox, we would still be using IE6.

If it wasn't for Linux, there would probably not nearly the investment in Vista and Win7 that there has been.

And, I guarantee you, that if there were no Linux free IDEs, there would be no Visual Studio Express. I doubly guarantee you, that, if there was no gcc, there would be no standards compliant C++ in Visual Studio.

Google may not conquer the world with Chrome OS, and I think will ultimately lose to Microsoft, but, competition benefits everyone.

What will Google do to bolster search to respond to Bing? How will Adobe respond to Silverlight... you can laugh at Silverlight 1.0, dismiss 2.0, but MS has away of just chugging away like the borg when they want to attack a market.

It's all bound to keep people on their toes. What would be the alternative? A treaty between Google and Microsoft keeping each other in the browser and desktop, respectively? That would suck.

CRINGELY is an Idiot

[mlwmohawk]

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?

Re:not good?

[Goody]

Oh, please. Google OS is a glorified web browser tailored to netbooks. It won't even make a scratch on Windows' entrenchment in the desktop market.

Considering the huge number of users who know nothing but how to use a web browser, I think you're quite mistaken. I think it's very likely that Chrome OS will replace Windows for most non-geek consumers -- and because it's going to be open source, a lot of geeks will probably adopt it too.

And the same huge number of users when asked "what OS do you want on your new PC, Windows or Google Chrome?", will say "Windows" because they don't have a clue what an OS is and "Windows" sounds vaguely familiar. The only way the clueless masses will use it is if it's the only choice on a cool-looking netbook or laptop and they're hooked on the color of it.

As far as I can tell, Google Chrome is a glorified web dumb terminal that some people will happen to run Linux apps on. Businesses won't flock to it because it will lack Windows application compatibility. Clueful home users won't use it for the same reason ("Hey, why can't I use iTunes on this laptop or pull pictures from my Kodak camera using their Windows application???")

I like open source just as much as the next guy here and I'd love to see a competitor to Windows, but my need to get work done supersedes my desire to make a statement about open software. With what we currently know, the Google Chrome OS is as much a competitor to Windows as Google Docs and Gmail is to Microsoft Office and Outlook/Exchange.