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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.'"
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.
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.
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.