Google's Microsoft Moment

http://dashes.com/anil/2009/07/googles-microsoft-moment.html

by blasdel • 17 years ago

79 35 17 years ago

stilist• 17 years ago

Interesting theory. There have certainly been occasional questions about exactly how trustworthy the company is, but no lasting negativity that I've seen. I suppose it has been long enough—and Google is big and broad enough—that a real backlash could begin to appear.

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

Agree. Extra points for the cartoon, which I hadn't seen before.

inerte• 17 years ago

One guess, a backslash might appear when people want to move data from Google to another company, pretty much like Office file formats.

iamelgringo• 17 years ago

I've had this nagging feeling/paranoia the past year, that I'm really not comfortable with the massive amounts of data that google obtains on me. If someone came along and gave me a better email experience with a calendaring system that I could pay for and be reasonably ensured that my payment was keeping my data private. Id jump off the Google platform relatively quickly.

jsz02• 17 years ago

Safe from what?

Safe from misuse by Google? I think that's a risk you take with any third party provider. Being one of many millions of users does provide some security through obscurity in that respect. Chances are most of us are just not special enough to be legitimate targets.

Safe from misuse by bad guys outside of Google via security problems? I'm pretty confident Google has some of the best engineers out there. You also have a strength in numbers thing going for you with Google. Lots of people are looking at it. Google is very high profile -- if they did have a leak you'd at least know about it. I can't say the same about some random provider. They could have half wit engineers who cover up data leaks. You might never know. Even bad providers can have sterling record if they choose not to report problems or simply have a run of good luck until someone copy & pastes the wrong command and every bit gets leaked.

Safe from being an anonymous fraction of a statistic when Google aggregates its data? I'd be more worried about my ISP spying on me.

Overall I think it's good to be aware of the risks but realistically there isn't a whole lot you can do about it no matter which provider you're using. If you were to separate all your different accounts to different providers you might at least spread the risk out. If you choose to run your own server(s) you quickly become the weakest link in the security chain. Even if you're a pro it probably won't be your full time job to administrate your servers so that already puts you at a disadvantage.

tome5• 17 years ago

What worries me about Google is not that it has my data, but that it has a massive cross section of my data:

   * search records
   * e-mail
   * calendaring
   * documents
   * which youtube videos I've watched

etc. I'm sure it's much more than proportionally easier to abuse this information the wider the spread of it they have.

jodrellblank4• 17 years ago

Safe from what?

I can't answer that yet, but I don't think that's a good enough reason to ignore it. We are talking about the world's leading search company. There's no such thing as security through obscurity for them - they find needles in haystacks for a living.

We're also talking long term - none of this stuff is going to be deleted, it's only ever going to grow in their collective. What if you do become someone famous or important in twenty years?

Safe from misuse by Google? I think that's a risk you take with any third party provider

But it's more of a risk from Google for several reasons - 1) they have so much of it, and 2) they're so good at searching and correlating, and 3) they're so big their data is a major drooling point for .gov legislation or hacker interests.

Chances are most of us are just not special enough to be legitimate targets.

Agreed. But if anyone can automate something they-think-is-benign-but-I-disagree on everyone's data all at once, Google can.

jules• 17 years ago

The problem with Google is that they have all the data in one place. If you use multiple services they all know a lot less about you. This makes it a lot harder for a government or a person in the company to combine the information into a full picture. I agree that the ISP is a huge problem too.

sid• 17 years ago

Hmmm, i sometimes get that same kind of feeling though i always tell myself, "no it should be ok", they are trusted, smart, respect my privacy my data and benevolant ...

I store my emails using gmail, my code for my startup is backed up in my emails as a final restore point should something bad happen to my servers and source control, my design specs, tasks list are all stored within google document, my calculations and budgeting is done using googles spreadsheet. I still trust them and that is why i am still comfortable but to tell you the truth, the slightest glitch or security leak, or signs of evilism would really make me think twice.

To add to this discussion a few things i have noticed (could be my paranoia, but who knows ..). A while back during uni there was this company called bullant (not sure if anyone ever heard of them). They had a decent product which consisted of a browser and a backend VM engine. There were a few features of the backend engine that i thought were really good and nice to develop in and generated really great apps that could be delivered over the internet. However i think the product didnt fly because it required users to change and use their own proprietry browser, the change was to drastic for users, it wasnt gradual enough as many users were already used to mozilla/netscape and ie.

If i draw the comparisions sometimes i wonder if the introduction of chrome, the new V8 engine and all the hype of SaaS, whether this is a slow movement similar to what bullant all those years back tried to do. I wonder whether slowly and incrementally certain really great google apps will be just that tiny bit slower in ie or ff and slowly over time would certain features of the new great google app that everyone uses and loves stop working in those other browsers requiring us to all change to chrome to get the most out of it ? I sometims think whether the vision is that sometime in the future we all log into our linux/apple/windows computers and for 80% of the time fire up our chrome browsers go straight to our favourite google app saved in our favourites and no longer require 80% of the applications that we now have installed on our PC's ?

dustice• 17 years ago

I've seen many articles recently that suggest Microsoft's bundling of Browser to OS is analagous to Google's bundling of OS to Browser. They miss the key distiction that Google's offerings are /free/ and open-source. You don't like the OS? No problem, you can run Chrome (or Chromium) on whichever OS you want. No lock-ins, no harm to the user.

jodrellblank4• 17 years ago

Assuming you were buying Windows because you wanted Windows for some unrelated reason, or buying a computer with Windows, then you also got IE, but you were free to run other browsers.

How is it being closed source a meaningful distinction?

trezor2• 17 years ago

Chrome != Chromium. Anyone who has tried Chromium in Linux will instantly notice they are using a much less polished product.

Chromium may be open source, but Chrome is not.

ljlolel• 17 years ago

If I may ask, how is it less polished? I'm posting with Chrome for Linux right now (and I used Chromium before, which is identical) and it looks beautiful.

Excepting of course external plugin type issues (printing and Flash don't work yet), the browser runs super-fast, never crashes, and looks great. Some of the configuration options aren't complete, but those are minor issues (oh and I see they have added many of them).

fatdog789• 17 years ago

Free is not, and never has been, a defense to antitrust. Indeed, free offerings are generally considered very good evidence of antitrust: the company at issue is abusing its market power in one market to increase its market power in another market in non-competitive ways (i.e., by using money earned from a separate market to undermine the target market through under-priced goods). The obvious worry is that the products will stop being free (or so cheap) once the company has achieved sufficient market control.

It does not matter what the end user can do, antitrust focuses on what the alleged monopolist is doing.

Also, choice is not a defense to antitrust under the Sherman Act. That's a common misconception among non-lawyers. Choice is only weak evidence, at best, that the an alleged monopolist's activities are not anti-competitive.

ZeroGravitas• 17 years ago

Am I wrong or is this just not true:

"Google's recent development work on applications for mobile devices has often been delivered exclusively as applications for their own Android platform instead of as iPhone applications"

I don't own an Android phone so maybe there's lots going on I'm not aware of but there seems to be plenty of stuff developed for a) any browser, b) any decent browser, c) iPhones specifically, d) java smartphones, e) Windows, f) Mac, g) Linux.

He state's this is what Microsoft was like 5 or 10 years ago, and yet I think this is still true of Microsoft today. Certainly Microsoft sales folk I've recently come into contact with seem to be actively denying the existance of other browsers in relation to Sharepoint stuff.

nostrademons• 17 years ago

Yeah, I was gonna point that out. I've got some friends & family members with iPhones, and they use Maps & GMail all the time. I've met someone on the Mobile-Maps team, and he's always carrying around at least 3 different phones because he has to develop for them all. I work on the search UI, and a rough ordering of the amount of time I spend on each browser goes something like Firefox > IE7 > IE8 > IE6 > Chrome > Safari > Opera > Konqueror. The only browser that really gets screwed is Konqueror, and to a lesser extent Opera (sorry guys). There've been features that we launched for Firefox+IE but cut for Chrome due to time restrictions - yeah, it's embarrassing to not support our own browser, but it's less painful than cutting off 20% of the market.

rjurney3• 17 years ago

The problem here is that in combination with Wave, Google is setting the platform that we are supposed to develop for a year or more before it exists. That IRRITATES the hell out of me. It is the same kind of egotistical douschebaggery Microsoft used to pull: pre-launching products to gain control before contributing anything.

Watching the Wave introduction video... when I see that semi-euro, T-shirt wearing trim-bearded fuck up there on that stage with his falsely elegant peppy smart talk planning a 'boating trip', and the scripted passing back and forth with 'the best project manager in the world,' I see one thing and one thing only in my mind: Ballmer's sweaty bitch tits bouncing up and down, round and round, as he stomps and screams, vibrating to the tune of "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!"

At least Ballmer had the good sense to be ugly, which gave him an odd kind of dignity.

I think I prefer this stagecraft http://bit.ly/pwGXs to this stagecraft http://bit.ly/15aSar because Google's culture of arrogance is starting to disgust me.

freetard• 17 years ago

> It is the same kind of egotistical douschebaggery Microsoft used to pull: pre-launching products to gain control before contributing anything.

Well no, Google Wave will be open source and they already published the whole protocol and API so people can build clones of it before it's even released. Microsoft releases proprietary API ran on secret protocol no once can clone unless they get sued or do crazy reverse engineering in a country where they can't be sued. Not quite the same thing.

rjurney3• 17 years ago

Granted - FOSS is good. But the traffic will still be running through google for almost all of this. And that, combined with their sole invention of this... I don't like it. I'm tired of them. They are too big. The worship bothers me. They've turned a corner.

bd• 17 years ago

Well, the guy that probably orchestrated this Wave presentation came to Google from Microsoft (where he was "General Manager of Platform Evangelism").

http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/29/technology/msft_brain_drain....

rjurney3• 17 years ago

HA! Thanks. I should have known...

tybris• 17 years ago

I thought we were past the short-sighted Microsoft is evil childishness. In general, if you think a large group of people is evil or stupid (especially if these people are known to be very, very smart), you are wrong and should be wondering why.

If a company is growing its business is to be on the offense, challenging the competitors products. When it becomes too big to adapt to the changing needs of the customer quickly it needs to go on defense to protect its business. Has nothing to do with stupid or evil, just business.

rdrimmie• 17 years ago

The post isn't about evilness (and in fact Dash has frequently defended Microsoft, as he states). The post is about a corporate entity growing past the point where the internal concept of 'self' that its staff has differs largely from the external concept of its identity that the public has.

Google's Microsoft Moment

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