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Is Google the New Microsoft?
ericjones12398 writes "Google's come up with its solution for Dropbox: If you can't buy 'em, copy 'em. The search engine and online advertising giant replaced its popular Google Docs service with Google Drive, a cloud computing storage service designed to directly compete with start up Dropbox. This raises the question, has Google become the new Microsoft? Us ancient folk who remember the 1990s and the Microsoft anti-trust trial can certainly notice some parallels. A big, dare we say monolithic, company doesn't bother innovating on its own. It just waits for other companies to innovate, makes some changes for legally significant distinctions and enters into competition with the innovator. Sound familiar?
That was never the case, ever.
Let's also remember that Microsoft also blatantly stole. Remember Stacker?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
All big companies do this. It's not proof that Google is Microsoft. It's proof that Google is big. What made Microsoft distinct was the way it competed. Google doesn't compete with the same level of carnage that Microsoft did. There has been some bloodshed, but the fact that Google+ is where it is, would be a good way to demonstrate the argument that Google is not Microsoft. Have there been allegations of predatory behavior? Yes, of course. Do you hear about it happening all the time? Not really. Google drive is kind of like Dropbox, but Amazon Drive is a lot more like Dropbox. Why is everyone talking about Google, when Amazon stole the service and copied it lock, stock, and barrel? Amazon is Dropbox's ISP for hosting this stuff. And yet, despite the fact that the case of Amazon is predatory, everyone's so concerned about the case of Google, which isn't? Why, exactly do people who care about predatory business practices care more about Google than Amazon? The mind boggles.
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It wasn't so much they stole as they infringed on patents.
Stac felt their patents covered software Microsoft bought from Vertisoft, improved upon and rolled into MS-DOS.
Stac was found to steal from MS though.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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Dude, are you really trying to make UID counter overflow? Your last failed sockpuppet is just a few hours old. I'm sure you can lost longer than that.
Having a monopoly (at least in the US) is not illegal. Abusing that monopoly is. Bundling IE and tying it deeply into the OS is what got Microsoft in trouble.
Exporting Google Mail isn't terribly difficult. Microsoft allowing you to import it has nothing to do with Google. Putting their stuff in their browser when they have 2 other major competitors has nothing on driving all other browsers out of the market and imposing a non-standard browser that set the web back a few years. WebM - lol you are clutching at straws aren't you. WebM has failed miserably to unseat h264 which is, unlike, Chrome, monopoly rent protected via patents. I suggest you read Judge Jackson's findings of fact and see just how badly behaved Microsoft were, and how Google, so far, have nothing at all on them as a scumbag corporation.
Have you ever tried to get a document or spreadsheet out of Google Docs and into one of the other on-line office suites? How about exporting your entire Google Mail archive and importing it into Hotmail?
Trolling much? I just tested.
Google docs :
File -> Download as -> Word, ODT, RDF, PDF, Text, HTML (Zipped)
I downloaded as ODT, and it looked exactly like on google docs. You can also batch download docs.
And Gmail support both POP3 and IMAP.. What else do you need?
Contacs list... CSV and vCard export.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Google Maps and Earth come from KeyHole Inc..
Google Maps came from Where 2 Technologies. But that doesn't change the basic point you make.
Yes, even their Search Engine wasn't really that novel.
Bullshit. Their algorithm, page rank, was something brand new that was a significant improvement on the two standard approaches to search engines: hierarchically organized oracles (Yahoo) and keyword matching based on relative frequencies (Altavista).
Seriously, I'm sorely disappointed by the amount of basic information that techies here are getting just plain wrong. I'm starting to think that the astroturfing/trolling is having an effect on people. How does it go? A lie gets half-way around the world before truth gets its pants on. As said, I'm pretty disappointed by the posts here.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
You've obviously never heard of google's Data Liberation Front.
Also, at the time Google first came out, the prevailing sentiment was that search was a dead end, that there was just too much stuff out there and it was impossible for algorithms to figure out how to pick out the best pages for a query. So when everyone else was focused on building big curated directories of the Internet, Google's innovation showed that search could not only work well, it could work much better than directories.
There are times when a quantitative improvement in quality provides a qualitative difference in utility, and those are innovations. One of my favorite examples is git -- git doesn't do anything that several other distributed version control systems didn't do first, but git's primary innovation was to do it all hugely faster. So much faster that it improves productivity not just by reducing time spent waiting for the computer, but by actually changing the way people use the tool. Web search was drowning in crap results and everyone expected that as the web got bigger this problem would continue to grow, so search was doomed -- until Google showed that it wasn't, that in fact it's the most natural way for people to interact with huge volumes of dynamic data, if done well.
For that matter, Larry Page believes that Google has -- even today -- only solved about 10% of the search problem, and that there are huge opportunities for additional innovation in that space.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer. I don't work on search, or Drive. I mostly work on Google Wallet which is clearly a blatant ripoff of... er...)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Gmail has search and spam filtering capabilities that no native client can remotely match. (Outlook's search functionality is a joke).
Searching and spam filtering are the two main features I need out of a mail client. The labeling system in gmail is just gravy.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Good think I saw this before hitting 'moderate'
Its possible gmail search works grand for you, but its complete and utter shit for me! Their inept search doesn't find tons of words that I KNOW are in the mails!
I have to pop it all to do offline searching because the search i gmail is utter crap.
Now i suppose its possible I've run into a bug, but you can't report bugs to google because their whole "support" website boils down to "go away user"
(Now some fanboy may say that there is a "report bug" menu item from one of the "menus" on the site - NO - there isn't - perhaps that's another bug from the company who only cares about who you are, and nothing about what you want)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
no, really, all you need to migrate off GMail is IMAP and it's right there. if Hotmail doesn't let you import via IMAP, it's their problem.
if they really want to go after GMail's users, they should implement it and write instructions on how to do it, including how to enable it in GMail - which takes exactly 4 clicks (Settings -> Forwarding, POP and IMAP -> IMAP = Enabled -> Save Changes).
IMAP makes it possible to migrate messages *and* folder structure.
what else do you expect Google to do? write a document on how to migrate off GMail? don't be silly!.. well, in fact, there is such a page. http://www.dataliberation.org/google/gmail
have a look at http://www.dataliberation.org/ in general. Google goes above and beyond anyone else in the industry with respect to providing ways to export data from its services.
Exchange relies on Internet Explorer for the "ajax" part, even to this day. Also, you have the minor issue of needing to run an Exchange server. Gmail required no server on my part, gave me oodles of storage space, completely took away my old habit of meticulously sorting email into folders, and responded almost as well as a real native application. It was amazing at the time.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.