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Google-Microsoft Crossfire Will Hit Consumers
theodp writes "Newsweek's Dan Lyons doesn't know who will be the winner in Google and Microsoft's search battle, but that's not stopping him from picking a loser — consumers. As we head towards a world where some devices may be free or really cheap, consumers should prepare to be bombarded by ads or pay a premium to escape them. 'The sad truth is that Google and Microsoft care less about making cool products than they do about hurting each other,' concludes Lyons. 'Their fighting has little to do with helping customers and a lot to do with helping themselves to a bigger slice of the money we all spend to buy computers and surf the Internet. Microsoft wants to ruin Google's search business. Google wants to ruin Microsoft's OS business. At the end of the day, they both seem like overgrown nerdy schoolboys fighting over each other's toys.'"
Quoted from TFA: "It's easy to see why Murdoch might like Ballmer's proposal. Murdoch has been grumbling for a while now about Google getting a free ride on his content. Google creates abstracts of news articles, places ads next to them, and keeps all the money." (Emphasis added.)
Maybe I'm missing something, but I hit Google News pretty much daily and I cannot recall ever seeing an ad on that page. It *looks* like a page of straight hypertext links that contain the story headline and a few words from the beginning of the original story being linked. I don't recall seeing many complete phrases in the text blurbs, much less a complete sentence, let alone a paragraph, or Xenu forbid, a story!
As for Macrocruft buying Murdoch's business, why Xenu bless them both! Far be it from me to interfere when one con man tricks another con man into paying for a new set of clothes for the Emperor.
http://www.dataliberation.org/
The ______ Agenda
As the other poster pointed out, Google makes a serious commitment to not locking you in, so much so that there's an internal team that works with all product groups to make sure the end users retain those essential freedoms, the result of that is available at http://www.dataliberation.org/
I personally know of no other company that has such an initiative (would be awesome to see MS do the same though, but somehow I'm not entirely hopeful that we'll see that day).
So what exactly are you basing your information on? I mean, I know it's the year of 'bashing Google' in Chinese astrology or something, but I mean cmon, lets keep some facts in the discussion or all we're doing is random trolling
As for the cloud, again, I want to be able to "Save as ... " to my hard drive. Google MAY JUST HAVE the very best application on earth for any given purpose, but if I can't move my data to wherever, whenever, in any given format, then it's worth about ten pounds of shit in a five pound sack.
Fortunately you can.
http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=49115
I honestly don't know why people assume this obviously necessary functionality isn't there.
Apple has done it. Where is the NeXT computer, by the way?
It was rebranded as a Mac Cube. The 68040 processor was replaced with a PowerPC and later with an Intel chip. The kernel was updated a bit and the Display PostScript server was replaced with Quartz. NeXT had exited the hardware business before Apple bought them, and were selling their OS for $499 (for the i486 version). Apple brought the price down and shipped it with their new systems. They gave away the NeXT developer tools (Project Builder and Interface Builder) for free with the system and even WebObjects (formerly several hundred thousand dollars) is free. You'd be hard pressed to point to any significant NeXT projects that were completely abandoned by Apple (although some nice things like NSDataLink were lost).
It's more accurate to say that NeXT cancelled a lot of good Apple projects (like the Newton) than that Apple killed off cool NeXT products. The NeXT products formed the core of the Apple product line after the takeover.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Safari isn't a Google product, so it has basically no relevance at all to what he was saying.
Also, you can change the search engine to something else if you really are that committed to using something inferior.
which is totally what she said
It gets pretty cumbersome if you have 1000s of files ... exporting them one at a time. Hence the lock-in.
Again with the assuming you can't do something.
I'm not providing the link again. Several people have done so within this thread.
Suffice to say, you can select multiple Google Docs and export them all at once. You can even get at them through an API.
You live in NY and you think good pizza is more expensive than the mediocre pizza and that's why there are so many mediocre pizza places around?
A $1.50 slice in Brooklyn or Queens will generally be better than a $5 slice in some tourist trap or hipster pizza place in Manhattan.
Agreed - because everything discussed on Groklaw is backed up with documentation. Therefore, if you read Groklaw, you will have followed the links to the Comes vs Microsoft material or the links to hundreds of other documents sufficient for any thinking person to come to their own, negative conclusions about Microsoft's business conduct.
Now you will also find conspiracy theories in abundance on Groklaw as well, as was pointed out in a comment above yours. It you are looking for entertainment, you may find them amusing, but an independent thinker will not pay much attention to this kind of discussion if he want to be informed. He will go straight to the documentation and make up his or her own mind.
I'm guessing you must not be familiar with the offline features of Google Gears which is included in Chrome:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/27/gmail-goes-offline-with-google-gears/
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2008/03/bringing-cloud-with-you.html