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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.'"
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.
For anyone else joining the real world, enjoy your stay. A business making money? This is madness!
This seem to be just an another story of a Google fanboy in his basement discovering that their do-no-evil "friend" is a normal company, a normal business which purpose is to generate revenue. He hasn't yet understood that money doesn't grow in trees and this is how our economy works. For him Microsoft seems like a bad guy because they dare to sell products at a price. Google is the 'cool and hippy' friend who offers everything for free. And what he doesn't understand is that the revenue is just generated other way, and he loses her privacy to an advertisement company. Google is not a search engine company, it's an advertisement company that uses internet searching to 1) gather very detailed information and usage statistics about people all over the internet 2) sell targeted ads to advertisers.
It's unnecessary to blame the companies how it is. "Making cool products" and not caring about business sounds more like a public service or some teenagers naive thinking before he comes contact with the real world. Of course two competing companies are going to.. eh, compete. That's how it works, that's how they generate income, but that's also how they're always on a run to improve their products.
If there weren't competing companies, it would be a lot worse situation. Just look at how the adsl and cable internet is in USA. People pretty much have only one choice of operator, and it's shitty. In lots of European countries there's many competing ISP's and you get faster and better service.
At the end of the day, they both seem like overgrown nerdy schoolboys fighting over each other's toys.
They're the exact opposite. They're businesses that have a clean plan and understand what they are doing. Microsoft wants more marketshare on search, Google wants more users locked in to their services to keep their 70% marketshare. Oh, you though Google wants to fight for OS marketshare? Just see how limited Chrome OS is. It's designed to offer people Google's services so they will be locked down in them. That's the whole idea behind it, not fighting to destroy Windows.
I don't recall this so called consumers loosing, when Microsoft tried to compete with Google with their last 2 (or was it 3) search engines. The only way you might loose is if you inflict pain upon yourself by using Bing. I give it a year maybe 2 before Bing is gone.
If you've been following Groklaw over the last few years, I should point out that Mr. Lyons is a huge SCO supporter. I can not say Microsoft pays him money, but anything and everything he says is designed to hit Microsoft's opponents from the side. He likes to say bad things about both Microsoft and Microsoft's opponent of the day, but in a way that Microsoft comes off the better of the two.
I'd put more trust into something John Dvorak had to say than Mr. Lyons.
Anyone who thinks that a device will be free underestimates how willing people in 3rd world countries are to build houses out of such devices, or nerds willing to wall paper their rooms with it, well you catch the drift I'm sure :)
On the other hand being able to have a 13" device without running into the fact that that requires a full Vista/Windows7 license (there's restrictions in the xp & cheaper netbook versions that limit them to 11" screens on netbooks) does make them a lot cheaper, but I fail to see how that would hurt the consumer?
Also some competitive pressure on Microsoft/Apple to lift such artificial restrictions that are designed to maximize their profit margins seems like a win for consumers in my book, or did we loose faith in this whole competitive market thing?
The only thing that does slightly worry me is the whole Murdoch / Microsoft assault on the open web, the alternative to robots.txt they propose (which allows partial pages to be indexed without being allowed to read the text around it) would allow spammers to create pages where only a popular search term bit of text would be surrounded by virii, scams and spam. It just won't work and it won't bring back the distribution monopoly's that Murdoch enjoyed for most of his (very long) life.
While I severely doubt the truth of the above anecdote (especially given your username) the basic point is correct. In the vast majority of circumstances more competition in a market is better for consumers not worse. This is one of the major reasons the United States has anti-trust rules. Consumers should be far more worried about a single monolith controlling an entire industry.
Yes, in the majority of cases more competition is better. Then there are operating systems.
Until applications and data are built on completely open standards -- interoperable with ANY capable device -- this multiple OS business is just a hassle for consumers.
Imagine if your must-have pizza topping was incompatible with any other company's pizzas!
Microsoft has always cared far more about crushing competition than providing anything of value to consumers. They buy up cool products just to shut them down, have a massive FUD engine, and promise the next version will be better but instead deliver Windows ME and Vista. Even if Google is just a money-grubbing competitor, it is a real competitor that Microsoft can't crush. Which means both companies will have to compete by offering something better to the consumers. Consumers win.
If that were true, then it would be true that pizza in New York was uniformly (or at least usually) good. In fact, though, most pizza in New York is edible, but not very good. That's not to say that there isn't such a thing as a good New York pizza--there is. But there's a phenomenal amount of mediocre pizza in New York. So your analysis doesn't apply. Why? I suspect that cheap pizza out-competes good pizza. So if you can predict the future of computing from the New York pizza situation, the future of computing is probably a ton of crap, with good stuff that's slightly more expensive if you put in the effort to find it. Which, to tell you the truth, sounds pretty familiar.
The good news is that Two Boots is making pizzas as fast as they can, they have an uptown location now, and the pizza there is still good.
Really. Google has never wanted to damage Microsoft, but they sure want to take every step possible to make sure that they 'play nice'. Yes, I suppose that this could be 'damaging' to MS's usual business methods.
Already Microsoft is swinging deals behind the scenes to better promote their new search engine (ref: Murdoch/MS search exclusions). I say let's get rid of the 'behind the scenes' deals - for both of them.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Hurting Microsoft IS helping consumers.
Dan "lyin'" Lyons figures out that companies aren't the warm fuzzy things he thought they were.
Dan also figures out that water is wet.
--
BMO
I suspect that cheap pizza out-competes good pizza.
This is actually a fairly common thing in Europe too. There's lots of kebab/pizza places that are run by people coming from Turkey or the area around. They directly compete with prices; cheap prices, but also cheap ingredients and somewhat bad service (there are exceptions tho, but in general). Those pizzas aren't that good, you'll find a lot better pizzas in the actual italian like pizza restaurants or the local pizza chain. But many people still use those because it's cheap, even if its just a $2-3 difference.
People are stupid when money comes in to question. Many choose a little bit cheaper, but more crappier thing over a quality product. That will probably happen to computers too, and is most likely already happening.
It was very clear in his writing - overt PR and not journalism. There's no "conspiracy theory" here since it was all so blatantly obvious in the SCO situation.
I don't know about his relationship with Microsoft and don't really care like the above poster does, all I consider is that this person has written a lot of very obvious lies in the past and cannot be trusted as a technical journalist. Using the fake Steve Jobs blogs to push an anti-linux agenda hard was also somewhat unprofessional and ultimately made it obvious as to who was writing it since he was doing SCO pieces at the time as well that overlapped.
Speaking as a consumer of netbooks, I am fed up paying the Microsoft tax, having them puke windows Vista all over my hard drive and vandalizing it with nasty plastic stickers on it. I format the drive, pull off the stickers and install Ubuntu. I hope Google wins and wipes MS out. Hardly fair when you cant choose not to have windows and are forced to pay for something you dont want.
Megacorps aren't charities.
Which is one reason I love using Free Software only in my computing ventures, I'm nobody's bitch.
If it comes down to the lesser of evils, Google wins by a big margin. If Google challenges Microsoft's OS dominance, the consumer benefits. If Microsoft and NewsCorp succeed in making the Web a collection of walled gardens, the consumer loses out! (Though I say that people will just switch to search aggregators. Heck, you could even run an aggregator as a local proxy! Would make a great GNU project.)
Google may be a "Megacorp," but it's still far less harmful than Microsoft. I say we side with Google and use it to knock Microsoft down a few more pegs.
The only people that are going to want a "free google 'welfarebook' with your 24-month wireless internet data contract - some conditions apply, yadda yadda yadda rip-off contract" will be those who can't come up with $200. Far from "do no evil", this will be "gouge the poor."
I don't see how you can call providing a free $200 device to use a service they want anyway as "gouging". Sounds like a damn good deal to me. It's going to cost them around $600 a year to connect to the internet anyway, how is offering a portable service plus a $200 device "gouging"?
Nobody needs a portable laptop with wireless internet. People want such a thing, but people also want Ferraris. You can hardly say Ferrari gouges the poor because their cars are so expensive. It would be especially hard to argue that Microsoft gouges the poor by offering to lease a $1 million car for $1k per month if you agree to drive it around with their logo on the side for as long as you kept the car. I WISH they would do such a thing, everybody would be able to drive Ferraris then!
That's pretty much what you're calling "gouging" here. It doesn't make any sense.
Do you even understand what gouging is? It's certainly not bundling all kinds of free goodies with a service, that's basically the opposite of what gouging is. Gouging is when you know consumers MUST buy your product, so you jack the price up far more than it costs to produce the product and offer a low level of service. It's pretty much impossible to "gouge" on a product that people don't need to buy at all. It usually happens with things like utilities, gas, groceries, and other regular necessary consumables.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
That's ad hominem, but you are right--this article is trash.
Google might be an advertisement company and not a search company, but they created and implemented the whole concept of unobtrusive text ads. Remember what the web was like before Google ads (and AdBlock)? You couldn't type in a url without a dozen pop-ups or a punch the monkey game. Can anyone really envision Microsoft or any other advertising company making ads LESS obtrusive if Google hadn't done so first?
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
How is Chrome OS locked on to Google's products? The products are the webapps, and you can use ChromeOS without ever using Gmail, Google Docs or whatever. Yes, you have to use Chrome (the browser), but in that OS the browser *is* the OS. Chrome OS without Chrome is just the Linux Kernel and few more. Install Firefox/Opera/wtv wouldn't make sense.
Dilbert RSS feed
You should always assume the worst. It's the only way to keep a company in check.
Uh, no. Microsoft's objective has always been to eliminate competition and choice - by any means, legal or not.
In the other corner, Google wants to give people more choice in operating systems that doesn't presently exist. (The idea that Google (or Apple) aspire to "eliminate" Windows is not credible.)
you had me at #!
People are stupid when money comes in to question. Many choose a little bit cheaper, but more crappier thing over a quality product. That will probably happen to computers too, and is most likely already happening.
Maybe people buy at exactly the price/quality point they want. Am I stupid for buying a cheap Seat Ibiza rather than an expensive Ferrari Testarossa? I don't think so. The difference in utility I'd get from the Ferrari is worth less to me than the money I've saved.
Given the choice between a $200 netbook and a $1000 high-spec laptop, one has to ask, is the extra stuff you can do worth $800? Different people will have different answers to that question.
"Corruption? Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations. That's Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel Prize. We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets. Corruption is why we win." Robert Baer / Stephen Gaghan - Syriana
Do you honestly think the lawsuits that make headlines are the only instances of corruption? The only reason Microsoft's unscrupulous business practices make headlines is because they're Microsoft, and not because it isn't standard practice for each and every corporation with over $1M legal budget.
If you want a reason to dislike Microsoft, start by looking at how they employ more lawyers than programmers. But unfortunately it's just more profitable that way. Much more. They have a responsibility to their stockholders to exploit it.
Don't hate the players, hate the game.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Yeah, well. That's what I don't get. I don't actually see how the grass is getting hurt here. Quoting the summary itself:
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
So I have the option of getting a product on the cheap (but I'll get bombarded with ads), or I can get the same product still on the cheap, and pay a surplus to get rid of the ads? As long as that surplus doesn't move the price above today's, the consumer isn't getting shafted. It's getting one more option.