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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 spent my childhood living in Naples, Italy. The city and community was filled with competition. My dad owned his own pizza place next to his cousins pizza place. They were angry at each other, many times going to the street in their white cooking clothes and yelling at each other. Other one took off customers from the another. They could had sold many more delicious pizzas, but couldn't because there just wasn't enough customers. What I learned from it was that you need a clean playing field, so I moved to New York and started my pizza place on the fifth avenue. But competition came there too. Then I decided to become a pizza consultant and just make pizzas for the fun of it. I've never been happier.
What I'm saying here is that in the end customers won't get hit by competition. It will be bad for the pizza place owners, but there will always be pizzas for everyone. And they will be even more delicious, because the pizza place owners have to fight harder.
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.
Normally the reaction to someone saying this kind of pinko commie crap is to laugh and tell them to go fuck themselves back to Russia.
But Lyons has a point. Competition, in this particular case, may not be the best thing for customers. Why so, you may ask. It is because of the lopsidedness of the market that makes this situation so precarious.
From the end of WWII until the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were two sides to every geopolitical debate. The side of good, right, and the American Way and the side of the Soviet Union. Countries aligned themselves along these very clear geopolitical boundaries. Though it was easy enough to declare allegiance to one side or the other, many countries found their own geopolitical aspirations dashed to smithereens on either the broad wings of the American eagle or the hard, solid face of the Iron Curtain.
However, with the end of the Cold War, vassal states are now finding their own voice. Countries that were previously shackled now find that the lack of a superpower competition has resulted in more opportunities for growth. Take two countries that America fought wars in as examples. Korea and Vietnam are now booming with economic and technological growth.
These opportunities don't come because they are subservient states to a particular superpower, but because they no longer need to pledge allegiance and are able to make their own way.
So when two superpowers like Microsoft and Google start duking it out, the fallout is going to hit partner companies AND consumers alike.
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.
Hurting Microsoft IS helping consumers.
people this is Dan lyons he is the guy who said SCO not only had a case but would win.
I would trust him being right about as much I would trust darl mcbride to be right. once a liar always a liar. Some people can change but the most will not have the strength to.
Besides it is almost anti-gogle for google to push even more ads on people. Google ads are almost always simple text based items that are off to the side. unlike MSFT which brands everything it touches two or three times.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
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