Unlike in search, hosted services for businesses is an area where Google is going to be playing catch-up with Microsoft for a long time. Google is attractive to individuals and some small businesses and a very small number of bleeding edge companies but most will choose to either stick with their on-premises software or will look to vendors like MSFT and IBM who have more enterprise experience. Microsoft is offering a "beta" of hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications (IM, presence) and LiveMeeting now (http://www.mosbeta.com/Welcome.aspx) and already has some big companies using it including Coca-cola.
Google's offering is actually pretty compelling in some ways. It's cheap to get into ($50/user/year although that doesn't include a lot of things that most companies would want such as directory integration, support for smartphones etc.). Google Apps are simple and easy to use. While they don't have a lot of features that many companies will want, for task workers with limited needs they made work. But their biggest gap - which they probably have no intention to fill - is that they ONLY offer hosted services. Microsoft can offer companies a choice of hosted, on-premises or a mix. Want users at HQ to use on-premises mail (Exchange)? No problem. Want remote workers to use a hosted version? No problem. Want integration with your on-premises Active Directory? No problem. Want to give users a choice of browser-based interface or Outlook for mail? No problem.
This flexibility is something that will ultimately win over a lot of customers who consider Google.
Perhaps you're right but I don't feel particularly paranoid. I just like the idea of PERSONAL computing. You know, the kind where I use my own PC to do what I want and control my data. I like the Web too, for finding information and sharing with others etc. But I'm not interested in a Web-dominant computing paradigm and I'm also not interested in Google or any other company knowing too much about me, my interests, business, communications, purchasing habits, travel habits...etc.
Not really a free advert for Live Search although I do use both - at least in part because I don't want to give Google too much information...just my very small part in keeping them from total domination. The search quality difference between Google and other good search services is minor. Check out http://www.searchdub.com/ for a side by side cmparison. Here's one result where I compare Google and Live Search...not a lot of difference: http://www.searchdub.com/comparegooglewithmsn.shtml?Fremont%20Solstice%20Parade
You have your history wrong with your Microsoft OEM comment. Microsoft's business innnovation was in realizing that software could be a big business in its own right. Prior to Microsoft the software business was dominated by hardware...you buy hardware, you get software. Gates realized that the real innovation and bigger business opportunity would be in writing software for any type of hardware. Microsoft certainly didn't have much if any sway with OEM's until they essentially created the PC OEM business by licensing DOS and then Windows to any and all comers. Compare that to Apple who refused to license MacOS to any other hardware companies.
Regarding mainstream media picking up on Google as business innovator vs. tech innovator...you don't get much more mainstream than Fortune.
Regarding the "trashing" example...I'll do a Live search on that and see what I can find. Perhaps a better turn of phrase would have been to say that Google seems to downplay the importance of locally running/manged PC and server sofware and suggesting that SaaS is the true future we should all buy into. Others, like me, would prefer to have higher goals...have locally running software that takes advantage of local storage, processing power, GPU's etc AND services that connect me to data, connect apps together etc. Doesn't that sound better?
Have you used Outlook Web Access? In many ways much better than Gmail.
By the way, if you want to look at innovators in AJAX, look no further than Microsoft and their early work on iFrame, Remote Scripting and XMLHttpRequest in IE5.
Fortun'e take on this is interesting (http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/03/technology/kirkpatrick_search.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008070405). They're arguing that Microsoft's pursuit of Yahoo has little to do with competing with Google on technology...because Google's innovation is not in technology. They're competing with Google's business model. This strikes me as very similar to some of the criticisms I hear on Microsoft: they don't innovate in technology - they innovate in business model (e.g. realizing that Windows/OS's was a good business).
It's intersting to see the mainsteam media starting to catch onto Google as business innnovator but not a technology innovator. I mostly agree with two big exceptions. One is that Google clearly has some decent search algorithms. Nothing that can't be equaled or beaten but they do provide decent search results. Two, while invisible to us, they must have some pretty amazing software to manage their datacenters. The irony there is that this innovation is more similar to enterprise software...the old boring on-premise stuff that Google likes to trash.
I agree with your point on IBM. But we were talking about Microsoft and their forsight to see that providing an OS that ran any any IBM-compatible/X86 hardware would provide developers with a lot of value and drive innovation. Apple was the company that made the mistake. They provided an only half-open platform. Anyone could build software for a MacOS (if you were willing to try hard enough and deal with their lousy libraries and tools) but only if it ran on Apple hardware.
All of those examples of PC's before Microsoft...Macs, OS/2, Sun workstations...are the problem. They were all islands running on non-standard hardware running incompatible operating systems. The great thing about Windows was that it provided a standard platform that any developer with half a brain could built cool apps for. The result was a huge amount of innovation from thousands of companies including, yes, Microsoft itself.
This gets modded as interesting? Jeesh.
I'll give is a try. What did he achieve? Well, most important, he was the one who had the vision of a computer on every desktop and who recognizead that software was the key, not hardware. It sounds obvious today but when Microsoft started, computers were for big companies or a small number of hobbyists. Gates and Allen realized that the microprocessor would eventualy make computing available to everyone and realized that software was what mattered. They didn't rip anyone off. That's a myth. They were smart enough to sell IBM a version of DOS that they purchased and modified with a non-exclusive license. They realized that having a standard platform on commodity hardware would lead to a huge amount of innovation. Before then, "personal computing" was a bunch of little islands...random UNIX's, MacOS etc...none of which worked with each other. All proprietary. Windows in that sense was very open. Microsoft made it easy for millions of developers to build any type of software or hardware that worked on Windows and spurred a wave of innovation.
Did they make money doing so? Yes. So what?
Go ahead, trout out the old nonsense about them achieving everything by stealing or cheating. When I hear that it reminds me of Rush Limbaugh... He has the evil ability to take a truth, turn it completely around and still call it truth.
Do you know how to read an income statement? I suggest you check out http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY08/earn_rel_q3_08.mspx#income. If by "run Microsoft into the ground" you mean grow revenue $7 billion from March 07 to March 08 and grow net income by $2.3 billion then I guess you must have very high standards. Or maybe you can't do math.
PS. Yes, I know there is more to running a company than revenue and income but that's certainly a good start.
Hopefully not a repeat post...Firefox error.;)
You're right...at least in part. If there had been no Windows, we would have had something else. The problem is, we very well have had MANY something else's instead of one Windows. Microsoft's genius was in recognizing the value of a "standard" platform that would run on any X86 hardware and that provided a common set of API's that developers could use to build applications on. Apple only got that equation part right - a standard platform but it only ran on Apple hardware. Windows ran on thousands of different combinations of hardware and generated an incredible wave of software innovation. You can try to argue that the end result of having multiple platforms may have been better but that's hard to support with facts. Unix predated Windows in a wide range of flavors and the result was some very powerful software but nothing near the huge range of innovations that arose out of the Windows 'ecosystem.'
You're right...in part. Something else would have certainlyh taken Windows place...I'm guessing MANY different something else's. What Windows did that may not have happend if Microsoft (and Bill Gates/Ballmer running the company) hadn't come along was provide a "standardized" platform that would run on any X86 hardware. The result was an explosion of innovation in hardware and software and ultimately very very low costs compared to what came before Windows. The alternative may have looked a lot like Unix/Linux...lots of OS flavors that all worked differently and that didn't provide a standard platform for developers. I'm convinced that Windows was a big net positive in this respect.
How about...I dunno...resolution? When I use Google maps it doesn't allow me to zoom down to the level where I can count the blades of grass in my lawn. The Hard Rock memorabilia site has resolution so high that you can see a fingerprint on Bo Diddley's guitar. On the Internet...that's pretty amazing.
It's worth noting that Microsoft has a stronger history of supporting multiple programming languages than pretty much any other company. Yes, they have a key platform in.NET that they want developes to use but developers have a wide range of choices of languages; VB, C#, Python, Ruby, hell even COBOL as well as dozens of others.
It's becoming increasingly interesting and funny to watch as google tries to adjust to success in search. They've got one hell of a business in search...not much else yet but search alone is enough to make them one of the most profitable companies in the world. The result is that people are watching them, just as people started watching Microsoft very closely in the mid 90's when they had unparalleled success. Although this little tiff isn't a huge deal in my opinion, it's symbolic of what they can expect for years to come. Honeymoon finally over?
Fair enough. I admire people with principles. But you may find that you miss out a lot if you ignore 4/5ths of the sofware in the world.
Also, recommending Celestia or another app over WWT would be sort of like me recommending a vacation to Cleveland (my home town) over New York City even though I had never been to New York City.
Celestia and Stellarium are very nice but pale in comparison to WWT. Just try them out side by side. Seriously, it's easy (yes, you have to have Windows...). Celstia is at http://www.shatters.net/celestia/download.html and Stellarium is at http://www.stellarium.org/. Neither offers to rich visualizations, amazing high resolution images, easy navigation, great "guided tours," community features, ability to easily create your own tours and many other things. You're talking apples and oranges. I have used Celestia and Stellarium before and they're cool but this is in a totally different league. I find it very hard to believe that you actually tried WWT. Did you?
Ummm.... I take it that you didn't bother to actually try out Worldwide Telecope. Because if you did, you wouldn't even begin to compare it to Stellarium. Stellarium is sort of neat but offers about 1/100000000th of what WWT has. It's not even fair to compare them. But at least look at WWT before you post this kind of nonsense. Others, you can download Stellarium from here: http://www.stellarium.org/. It's kinda neat but...
Insightful for this post? Puleeez! You can download Silverlight for Mac today...and could a year ago as well. Silverligth for Linux, developed by Novell with support from Microsoft, is either already available or well into development. How many years was Flash NOT available for Linux after Linux first became widely avaialble? I don't know myself but I'm guessing it was a long time. This is a dumb/. article.
Here's one source: http://pulse2.com/2008/04/12/capital-research-global-investors-antes-up-to-6-billion-on-yahoo/
Capital Research Global Investors is Yahoo's single largest shareholder. They purchased $2 billion worth of Yahoo on/around April 12, uppping their ownership percentage from 5.2% of the company to 10.1%. That means they purchased an additional 50 million plus shares at a minimum price of $27.50/share. They likely paid more but I'll round down. As of today's current YHOO stock price (11:15 Pacific) which is $25.41 those shares have declined in value about $110 million. Now, if Yahoo had sold to Microsoft for $34/share, Capital Global Investors would have "netted" about $329 million on the new shares they purchased at $27.50. That's a "swing" from a profit of $329 million to a loss of about $109 million - for a total spread of about $428 million. Even for a big institutional trader like CRG that's not chump change.
And that's only one of their big shareholders. I'm sure there are similar stories for Legg Mason and others institutional shareholders...not to mention the 10's of thousands of mom and pop shareholders who really would have liked to bank.
That's what I call an ouch.
Uhh...not so much. That was a run-up on Friday in anticipation of a deal going through. My guess is Yahoo opens on Monday at about $20/share, maybe a bit higher because some shareholders will anticipate Microsoft or another buyer coming back with another (probaby lower) offer later this year. The end result will be billions of dollars in losses among Yahoo shareholders.
It'll be funny to see what happens to Yahoo's share price on Monday morning. A number of their bigger shareholders purchased additional shares after Microsoft's initial offer because they expected a deal. Now some of their biggest shareholders are caught holding the bag because of the arrogance of Yahoo management. Ouch.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike in search, hosted services for businesses is an area where Google is going to be playing catch-up with Microsoft for a long time. Google is attractive to individuals and some small businesses and a very small number of bleeding edge companies but most will choose to either stick with their on-premises software or will look to vendors like MSFT and IBM who have more enterprise experience. Microsoft is offering a "beta" of hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications (IM, presence) and LiveMeeting now (http://www.mosbeta.com/Welcome.aspx) and already has some big companies using it including Coca-cola. Google's offering is actually pretty compelling in some ways. It's cheap to get into ($50/user/year although that doesn't include a lot of things that most companies would want such as directory integration, support for smartphones etc.). Google Apps are simple and easy to use. While they don't have a lot of features that many companies will want, for task workers with limited needs they made work. But their biggest gap - which they probably have no intention to fill - is that they ONLY offer hosted services. Microsoft can offer companies a choice of hosted, on-premises or a mix. Want users at HQ to use on-premises mail (Exchange)? No problem. Want remote workers to use a hosted version? No problem. Want integration with your on-premises Active Directory? No problem. Want to give users a choice of browser-based interface or Outlook for mail? No problem. This flexibility is something that will ultimately win over a lot of customers who consider Google.
If Linux can work as well as a Mac or a Windows PC with hardware in three years it might be worth seriously considering for non-hobbyists.
Perhaps you're right but I don't feel particularly paranoid. I just like the idea of PERSONAL computing. You know, the kind where I use my own PC to do what I want and control my data. I like the Web too, for finding information and sharing with others etc. But I'm not interested in a Web-dominant computing paradigm and I'm also not interested in Google or any other company knowing too much about me, my interests, business, communications, purchasing habits, travel habits...etc.
No, not a MSFT PR guy. But also not an anti-MSFT flame thrower.
I'll give you one obvious example of where OWA is better than GMAIL: better integration with Exchange. ;)
Not really a free advert for Live Search although I do use both - at least in part because I don't want to give Google too much information...just my very small part in keeping them from total domination. The search quality difference between Google and other good search services is minor. Check out http://www.searchdub.com/ for a side by side cmparison. Here's one result where I compare Google and Live Search...not a lot of difference: http://www.searchdub.com/comparegooglewithmsn.shtml?Fremont%20Solstice%20Parade You have your history wrong with your Microsoft OEM comment. Microsoft's business innnovation was in realizing that software could be a big business in its own right. Prior to Microsoft the software business was dominated by hardware...you buy hardware, you get software. Gates realized that the real innovation and bigger business opportunity would be in writing software for any type of hardware. Microsoft certainly didn't have much if any sway with OEM's until they essentially created the PC OEM business by licensing DOS and then Windows to any and all comers. Compare that to Apple who refused to license MacOS to any other hardware companies. Regarding mainstream media picking up on Google as business innovator vs. tech innovator...you don't get much more mainstream than Fortune. Regarding the "trashing" example...I'll do a Live search on that and see what I can find. Perhaps a better turn of phrase would have been to say that Google seems to downplay the importance of locally running/manged PC and server sofware and suggesting that SaaS is the true future we should all buy into. Others, like me, would prefer to have higher goals...have locally running software that takes advantage of local storage, processing power, GPU's etc AND services that connect me to data, connect apps together etc. Doesn't that sound better?
Have you used Outlook Web Access? In many ways much better than Gmail. By the way, if you want to look at innovators in AJAX, look no further than Microsoft and their early work on iFrame, Remote Scripting and XMLHttpRequest in IE5.
Fortun'e take on this is interesting (http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/03/technology/kirkpatrick_search.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008070405). They're arguing that Microsoft's pursuit of Yahoo has little to do with competing with Google on technology...because Google's innovation is not in technology. They're competing with Google's business model. This strikes me as very similar to some of the criticisms I hear on Microsoft: they don't innovate in technology - they innovate in business model (e.g. realizing that Windows/OS's was a good business). It's intersting to see the mainsteam media starting to catch onto Google as business innnovator but not a technology innovator. I mostly agree with two big exceptions. One is that Google clearly has some decent search algorithms. Nothing that can't be equaled or beaten but they do provide decent search results. Two, while invisible to us, they must have some pretty amazing software to manage their datacenters. The irony there is that this innovation is more similar to enterprise software...the old boring on-premise stuff that Google likes to trash.
I agree with your point on IBM. But we were talking about Microsoft and their forsight to see that providing an OS that ran any any IBM-compatible/X86 hardware would provide developers with a lot of value and drive innovation. Apple was the company that made the mistake. They provided an only half-open platform. Anyone could build software for a MacOS (if you were willing to try hard enough and deal with their lousy libraries and tools) but only if it ran on Apple hardware.
All of those examples of PC's before Microsoft...Macs, OS/2, Sun workstations...are the problem. They were all islands running on non-standard hardware running incompatible operating systems. The great thing about Windows was that it provided a standard platform that any developer with half a brain could built cool apps for. The result was a huge amount of innovation from thousands of companies including, yes, Microsoft itself.
This gets modded as interesting? Jeesh. I'll give is a try. What did he achieve? Well, most important, he was the one who had the vision of a computer on every desktop and who recognizead that software was the key, not hardware. It sounds obvious today but when Microsoft started, computers were for big companies or a small number of hobbyists. Gates and Allen realized that the microprocessor would eventualy make computing available to everyone and realized that software was what mattered. They didn't rip anyone off. That's a myth. They were smart enough to sell IBM a version of DOS that they purchased and modified with a non-exclusive license. They realized that having a standard platform on commodity hardware would lead to a huge amount of innovation. Before then, "personal computing" was a bunch of little islands...random UNIX's, MacOS etc...none of which worked with each other. All proprietary. Windows in that sense was very open. Microsoft made it easy for millions of developers to build any type of software or hardware that worked on Windows and spurred a wave of innovation. Did they make money doing so? Yes. So what? Go ahead, trout out the old nonsense about them achieving everything by stealing or cheating. When I hear that it reminds me of Rush Limbaugh... He has the evil ability to take a truth, turn it completely around and still call it truth.
Do you know how to read an income statement? I suggest you check out http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY08/earn_rel_q3_08.mspx#income. If by "run Microsoft into the ground" you mean grow revenue $7 billion from March 07 to March 08 and grow net income by $2.3 billion then I guess you must have very high standards. Or maybe you can't do math.
PS. Yes, I know there is more to running a company than revenue and income but that's certainly a good start.
Hopefully not a repeat post...Firefox error. ;)
You're right...at least in part. If there had been no Windows, we would have had something else. The problem is, we very well have had MANY something else's instead of one Windows. Microsoft's genius was in recognizing the value of a "standard" platform that would run on any X86 hardware and that provided a common set of API's that developers could use to build applications on. Apple only got that equation part right - a standard platform but it only ran on Apple hardware. Windows ran on thousands of different combinations of hardware and generated an incredible wave of software innovation. You can try to argue that the end result of having multiple platforms may have been better but that's hard to support with facts. Unix predated Windows in a wide range of flavors and the result was some very powerful software but nothing near the huge range of innovations that arose out of the Windows 'ecosystem.'
You're right...in part. Something else would have certainlyh taken Windows place...I'm guessing MANY different something else's. What Windows did that may not have happend if Microsoft (and Bill Gates/Ballmer running the company) hadn't come along was provide a "standardized" platform that would run on any X86 hardware. The result was an explosion of innovation in hardware and software and ultimately very very low costs compared to what came before Windows. The alternative may have looked a lot like Unix/Linux...lots of OS flavors that all worked differently and that didn't provide a standard platform for developers. I'm convinced that Windows was a big net positive in this respect.
Check out the fingerprint on Bo Diddley's guitar. That's pretty cool too.
How about...I dunno...resolution? When I use Google maps it doesn't allow me to zoom down to the level where I can count the blades of grass in my lawn. The Hard Rock memorabilia site has resolution so high that you can see a fingerprint on Bo Diddley's guitar. On the Internet...that's pretty amazing.
CSI is using Microsoft's Deep Zoom technology...I think you're saying that but wasn't sure.
It's worth noting that Microsoft has a stronger history of supporting multiple programming languages than pretty much any other company. Yes, they have a key platform in .NET that they want developes to use but developers have a wide range of choices of languages; VB, C#, Python, Ruby, hell even COBOL as well as dozens of others.
It's becoming increasingly interesting and funny to watch as google tries to adjust to success in search. They've got one hell of a business in search...not much else yet but search alone is enough to make them one of the most profitable companies in the world. The result is that people are watching them, just as people started watching Microsoft very closely in the mid 90's when they had unparalleled success. Although this little tiff isn't a huge deal in my opinion, it's symbolic of what they can expect for years to come. Honeymoon finally over?
Fair enough. I admire people with principles. But you may find that you miss out a lot if you ignore 4/5ths of the sofware in the world. Also, recommending Celestia or another app over WWT would be sort of like me recommending a vacation to Cleveland (my home town) over New York City even though I had never been to New York City.
Celestia and Stellarium are very nice but pale in comparison to WWT. Just try them out side by side. Seriously, it's easy (yes, you have to have Windows...). Celstia is at http://www.shatters.net/celestia/download.html and Stellarium is at http://www.stellarium.org/. Neither offers to rich visualizations, amazing high resolution images, easy navigation, great "guided tours," community features, ability to easily create your own tours and many other things. You're talking apples and oranges. I have used Celestia and Stellarium before and they're cool but this is in a totally different league. I find it very hard to believe that you actually tried WWT. Did you?
Ummm.... I take it that you didn't bother to actually try out Worldwide Telecope. Because if you did, you wouldn't even begin to compare it to Stellarium. Stellarium is sort of neat but offers about 1/100000000th of what WWT has. It's not even fair to compare them. But at least look at WWT before you post this kind of nonsense. Others, you can download Stellarium from here: http://www.stellarium.org/. It's kinda neat but...
Insightful for this post? Puleeez! You can download Silverlight for Mac today...and could a year ago as well. Silverligth for Linux, developed by Novell with support from Microsoft, is either already available or well into development. How many years was Flash NOT available for Linux after Linux first became widely avaialble? I don't know myself but I'm guessing it was a long time. This is a dumb /. article.
Here's one source: http://pulse2.com/2008/04/12/capital-research-global-investors-antes-up-to-6-billion-on-yahoo/ Capital Research Global Investors is Yahoo's single largest shareholder. They purchased $2 billion worth of Yahoo on/around April 12, uppping their ownership percentage from 5.2% of the company to 10.1%. That means they purchased an additional 50 million plus shares at a minimum price of $27.50/share. They likely paid more but I'll round down. As of today's current YHOO stock price (11:15 Pacific) which is $25.41 those shares have declined in value about $110 million. Now, if Yahoo had sold to Microsoft for $34/share, Capital Global Investors would have "netted" about $329 million on the new shares they purchased at $27.50. That's a "swing" from a profit of $329 million to a loss of about $109 million - for a total spread of about $428 million. Even for a big institutional trader like CRG that's not chump change. And that's only one of their big shareholders. I'm sure there are similar stories for Legg Mason and others institutional shareholders...not to mention the 10's of thousands of mom and pop shareholders who really would have liked to bank. That's what I call an ouch.
Uhh...not so much. That was a run-up on Friday in anticipation of a deal going through. My guess is Yahoo opens on Monday at about $20/share, maybe a bit higher because some shareholders will anticipate Microsoft or another buyer coming back with another (probaby lower) offer later this year. The end result will be billions of dollars in losses among Yahoo shareholders.
It'll be funny to see what happens to Yahoo's share price on Monday morning. A number of their bigger shareholders purchased additional shares after Microsoft's initial offer because they expected a deal. Now some of their biggest shareholders are caught holding the bag because of the arrogance of Yahoo management. Ouch.