A couple times per year the New York Times calls me up asking for an Op-Ed column on some technology topic. I don’t know how they found me but I’ve been writing these pieces since 1995. I think they call because I’m good at meeting tight deadlines. Lord knows that if there was a piece I actually wanted to get in the Times (my idea, not theirs) I have no confidence that I could get them to run it. Op-Ed at the Times — at least to me — is a sort of black box.
Here’s the column they asked for on Google’s Chrome OS: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/opinion/13cringely.html
The opinions expressed, as always, are ruthlessly my own.
Link to story is dead
Your link is just pointing to http:/. I am sure you are about to get a thousand of these comments.
working link as of Jul 12 21:38:26 PDT 2009 is:
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/opinion/13cringely.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=cringely chrome os&st=cse
Bob – the link to your article is spelled out correctly and works but the link it points to is just “http://” hence giving “invalid URL” if clicked.
Sorry about that. It should be working correctly now.
“deep pockets and fierce screwball reputation”
First time anyone compared Microsoft to Harpo Marx that I’m aware of.
LOL!!
Great article there. I never really thought of that angle on it before. I think that Apple are actually the best placed to topple Microsoft when the iPhone / iPod touch and their successors (tablet perhaps? or how about the Apple TV successor) become the replacements for the desktop and laptop PC’s. Just think how many PC users are already running OSX on their iPhones / iPod Touches without really thinking about it.
I can’t help but wonder if the netbook craze will be over before Chrome OS gets even a toehold on the market.
1.) If one is to believe polls, 6 out of 10 businesses claim they will pass on upgrading to Windows 7, for now, waiting for SP1 at the least. Not even a minuscule amount of those businesses will change their stack to Google, even for free, as there is still a bit of FUD about cloud services, most are going to sit tight and hang on to what they got.
2.) Worldwide, PC and laptop market is not going away overnight to be replaced by mobile devices and “invisible” computing. This happening at very gradual pace, at different times, in different places. Redmond is aware and is making plans via embedded software implementations. Apple may be poised to dominate with its mobile devices and may very well jettison its Mac business eventually, but there will very strong contenders, with their own appealing devices and proprietary platforms and apps. Somehow, Microsoft doesn’t seem to be a part of that future, as they fumbled the ball spectacularly and are losing more yards than a sandlot pick-up team against seasoned pros.
3.) Google really doesn’t care who wins as long as its search engine works everywhere and is not dependent on any one company – does Schmidt have nightmares about Microsoft? – I’d worry as much about Apple which can be more treacherous than Microsoft. The Chrome OS is about Google sending a message to its “buddy” Apple as it is to Microsoft. Who doesn’t know or suspect that Apple may have its own monster internet search engine being cooked up in its labs right now? Made especially for iPhone 4.0 or 5.0, initially, then ported to use on other PCs?
Good post. I agree with lots of it.
1. A lot more than 6 of 10 businesses also skipped Vista, so when you say “hang on to what they’ve” got you’re talking about XP, possibly on hardware that’s starting get a little older. The thing is, that’s perfectly adequate for almost everyone since hardware capabilities rocketed past user needs ages ago. You’re right that Google’s stack isn’t going to get them off the mark on its merits, but that has less to do with the options for the next step and everything to do with current needs being met. (And in this economy that also means riding your current capital investment, which doesn’t hurt at all.)
2. I’m on board with the idea that mobile won’t be sweeping the land any time soon, and I doubly agree that MS failed badly. But here’s why: historical platform changes are always measured by leaps in software. That is, the DOS PC let users do things locally for the first time, the Mac was a GUI for everyone, Win3.0 brought that to the business world and Win95 simplified that experience immeasurably, the internet took the whole world of technology and threw it over the barn. The new phone platform has a bunch of neat new faces, maybe the best of which is the iPhone. MS failed because their big new offering was too much like their old offering, evolutionary instead of a leap ahead, and people glanced, compared and said “Meh.”
Also, the trouble with the whole mobile or invisible platform is that it can’t be a replacement for the desktop world yet and the old XP world from point #1 hasn’t changed lately to make a place for it. There’s a lot of pent up demand for something to change here, and the netbooks are just the latest manifestation of that need to bridge mobile form factor with desktop functionality.
3. I completely agree that this is more than a jab at MS. Beyond Apple, it’s also kind of a message to the whole Linux/BSD crowd. By commoditizing the the desktop OS they’re sort of telling the OSS crewe “The OS is done, go build some apps.” This has been apparent to many for quite some time, but explicitly saying it and handing them Chrome and Ajax and Gears is a nudge down this path. There’s been a warm fuzzy out there between the OSS community and Google (open, beer-free and non-proprietary Google) since day 1, and this might be a move to try to capitalize on it. Of course, by pushing a closed, proprietary cloud platform and asking them to trade in their C+ the OSS guys might get cranky and bolt, but that may happen anyway.
Chris E wrote: 2. I’m on board with the idea that mobile won’t be sweeping the land any time soon, and I doubly agree that MS failed badly. But here’s why: historical platform changes are always measured by leaps in software. That is, the DOS PC let users do things locally for the first time, the Mac was a GUI for everyone, Win3.0 brought that to the business world and Win95 simplified that experience immeasurably, the internet took the whole world of technology and threw it over the barn.
Historically you have to go further back than PC/DOS. The Apple II, Commodore PET, and Radio Shack TRS-80 let users do things locally years before PC/DOS.
For the record, my twenty five year old TRS-80 64K CoCo 2 (the Motorola chip was upgraded)running on a MPI (Multi-Pak Interface) using an external hard drive and running on Microware OS-9 still hums along very efficiently.
Hi Kevin. To your OS 9 comment below. – You’ll be happy to know that you can probably eventually even add “modern cloud computing” to the list of things your updated 25 year old machine can do. Check out: https://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ found via: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/07/browse-the-web-in-style-with-classilla-for-mac-os-9.ars
Great article!
Thanks for another really interesting article.
“What Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, has to fear more than anything else is that he’ll awake one day to learn that the Google search engine suddenly doesn’t work on any Windows computers: something happened overnight and what worked yesterday doesn’t work today. It would have to be an act of deliberate sabotage on Microsoft’s part and blatantly illegal, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.”
I think we’ve already seen an early example of this. I’m pretty sure Microsoft recently switched the default search in IE from Google to Windows Live. I’d be interested to know what kind of impact this had on Google Search? I see Chrome, in part, as a fight back against this.
With around 20% market share[1] I wonder if the Mozilla Foundation would ever consider entering into a financial agreement with Microsoft? Don’t really think they would but it would make for an interesting 2011, which is the year their agreement with Google runs out.[2]
“Remember Microsoft was less than five years old when I.B.M. plucked it from obscurity to provide PC-DOS, with Microsoft eventually turning on Big Blue and driving I.B.M. from the PC business entirely.”
Microsoft may have pushed Big Blue out of the PC business but it certainly hasn’t sent them packing. Last year IBM had a net income of US$12.31b, only a couple of billion behind Microsoft’s US$15.82b.[3]
Looks like we’re in for some interesting times in this good ol’ monopoly-off!
Cheers,
Scott.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#Market_adoption
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing
[3] https://www38.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=income+Microsoft+IBM+Google
I think Google are much more vulnerable to an attack from Microsoft. Basically, if Bing performs as well as Google (which it seems to do, in my opinion) then the only thing keeping people using Google is inertia. And we’ve seen with social networking sites how these sites which rely on inertia and fashion can disappear overnight.
Microsoft, on the other hand, seems much more secure from attack because of its installed base of operating systems.
Google is far more vulnerable than people realise. It’s grown big by riding its luck for a long time – no more than that. I like the pop-up site previews on Bing. And the cheerful pictures on its homepage. It won’t take much to persuade people to switch.
Also, “Bing” is four letters, “Google” is six. Why type an extra two letters if you’re in a rush? Also, why say two syllables when you can say just one: “I’m going to Bing that”. It sounds silly, but it’s true. It’s an marginal advantage which can reap benefits over time. It’s what happens on the margins will decide the winner when there are no other differences between the products.
Google also has 4 letters.
A perfect example of why the population thinks IT people are jerks.
I thought it was funny.
I buy the argument that Andrew is making, but only for spoken words. How many people actually type URLs these days? Even if I do, by the time I’ve typed “goo” into my browser, it has been auto-filled to say “google.com” and I just hit enter.
um – what browser are you using? Firefox, Safari, and Opera all have Google search boxes that require NO typing to reach Google; the search box only needs a search term (and Opera and Firefox are configurable so that, if you wanted, you could use that box to search only Bing, but apparently you’re not even aware of a better browser…)
Perfect.
I love jokes that make me think.
The majority of people on this comment board are underestimating Google in a big way. I don’t think Google is responding to Microsoft at all, I think they have a different vision of computing, and they are pursuing it. Take a look at the subsidiary projects they are gathering & working on. You have stuff like the acquisition of Blogger, the Google Books project, Chrome & Android, all of their web apps…and these are just some of the ones that are public and widely known.
This isn’t about replacing or competing with Microsoft or Apple (and why exactly would Apple get in to search?). Maybe I’m naive, but I think web & computing business culture is making a massive shift. Why conquer, when you can coexist?
Google’s aesthetic and culture is one which at least claims to prize authenticity, transparency, open content, creativity. There’s a reason big G resonates with the OSS community, programmers, creatives etc. Maybe it’s all posturing and PR, in which case, who cares. But I think it’s eerier to imagine that it’s not, that we’re all going to be caught up in some massive changes over the next decade which could yield some intense societal impacts, paradigm shifts. But hey, that sounds like science fiction…
You make a good point there. I co-wrote a blog post last week about Google killers.
https://www.talkingfuture.com/2009/07/have-we-found-a-google-killer-and-does-it-matter/
I found that Bing was as near as matters the equal of Google. Its ahead on image search and slightly behind on overall relevance of results. As it isn’t demonstrably better than Google there is no reason to suddenly switch to it. There is a lot of inertia built up in Google-ing, but if people started to overcome that inertia and used Bing more often it would be very dangerous to Google’s earnings.
You’re not alone Andrew. Someone on Reddit recently linked to a site that aggregated search results from Bing, Google, and Yahoo. You type your search and results are shown from the three. What I found was, and it surprised me I might add, that overall Bing had the best descriptions across the board for each provided url. That included when Bing provided far less verbose descriptions than did either Yahoo, or Google. I’ve been, and continue to be a Google search user, but I’m considering switching because the results aren’t that different, and at this point Google’s site is beginning to look dated, especially in comparison to the interactive page Bing provides. For example I only discovered yesterday that Bing’s home site lets you hover over their front page picture for descriptions. That’s a nice touch. They’re featuring a Coati today, along with mouse-hover descriptions about the breed.
I think a lot of people are underestimating the appeal of Bing. If Microsoft starts shipping its browsers with Bing as the homepage instead of MSN I think what’s going to happen will take Google completely by surprise. Whenever I setup a new computer one of the first things I do, after installing firefox, is change the IE homepage to Google. If it shipped with Bing as the homepage, as of right now, I’d leave that in place.
I used to work for a guy who was a Microsoft executive in the 80s. He told me they tried to sell Word and Excel for DOS for years and had little or no success against Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect.
In the end, Gates knew he had to change the dominant computing platform to in order to sell new applications for that new platform. Came Windows, and came Word for Windows, and Excel for Windows and the rest is history.
For years Microsoft has fought to keep the dominant platform from changing again; they fought Netscape (so the platform wouldn’t change to the browser) and Java (so the platform wouldn’t change to Java) and are now fighting Google (so the platform won’t change to the cloud). However, I agree with you that Google’s interest are more in keeping the search ad revenue flowing in. They’re not keen on making the “bet-the-company” move required to change the platform. Google’s key revenue stream is ads and they are keeping their eye on the really big money which is network tv ad revenue cash and will inch towards taking a healthy bite out of that.
Apple, on the other hand, is making strides in changing the dominant platform from Windows to iPhone. If I was to bet, I’d say in 20 years, 60%+ computers will be portable, handheld, cloud-based, and running some form of Mac OS X.
I strongly disagree with you. While Google’s search engine works well, Microsoft’s operating System, Windows, does not. Computers are too slow, take too long to turn on, crash too often, and are far to susceptible to attacks. That’s Windows’ fault. How do we know this? Simple. Other operating systems behave better. However, Microsoft has remained on top because those competing operating systems have big problems of their own: Apple’s OS only comes on Apple computers, which are much more expensive than Dells ot HPs, and Linux comes in 1000 flavors, looks goofy (unless it is customized, but that’s hard to do), and is much too difficult to install for the average user.
Clearly, Google has a shot at coming up with an operating system that does what Google claims it’ll do: Boot up in seconds and focus on reliability. And even if they don’t succeed, they will force Microsoft to try to improve Windows. It’s a win-win.
I disagree with you on this one, Bob.
First, Google Search is extremely vulnerable to Bing. AdSense and AdWords are more secure (because advertisers have invested in those platforms), but they are not nearly as secure as Windows and Office. But they’re not invulnerable, and Microsoft isn’t fooling around. They know Google is one of the few companies with the resources and engineering depth to put them in the hurt locker, and they’ll do anything to starve Google of revenue.
Further, Google wants to grow its revenue beyond Search and Ads. It’s second core competency (after Search) is running those really big date-centers super-efficiently, which is why it can offer Google Apps and Google App Engine at low price points. Chrome and Chrome OS (combined with HTML5 technologies and the O3D and Native Client plugins) could encourage developers to change the predominant application platform from Windows to “the web”, meaning Google’s App Engine would be “the” mainframe to the Internet computing era.
Chrome OS is necessary in addition to Chrome Browser in this regard because developers want to reach as many users as possible using the fewest development resources. The more fragmented the OS market is between Chrome, Windows, Mac and whoever else, the more likely developers are to say “Forget it! We’ll just do it once on the web.”
Lastly, you didn’t mention how Microsoft isn’t fighting just Google. Google’s business model is complementary with Apple and Amazon. Apple sells hardware, and Safari can run any web application that Chrome can – possibly finally closing the application gap between Mac OS and Windows if the Web as Platform takes off with developers. And Amazon wants its Web Services to run those web-apps, like App Engine. Apple has already been contributing to the same web-as-platform forces that Google does, and I expect Amazon will to.
I once said “If you never purchased a Borland product, you still benefited from Borland.” My reasoning was simple, before Borland PC compilers were junk. To this day I honestly do not know how some of the early products were written. Borland brought better compilers to market, then later interesting applications too. They competed with Microsoft and in doing so the quality of software coming out of Microsoft improved greatly. We all benefited from this.
Over time Microsoft’s competition faded from the marketplace. This happened sometimes by actions of Microsoft. More often than not, many companies put themselves out of business. We need competition again in the PC industry. We need lean and mean operating systems and applications. We need some competitive price pressure.
Maybe the netbook is not the next big intelligent platform, or maybe it is. Digital electronics have evolved to the point whereby we could find very capable PC-like functionality being added to a variety of products. Chances are those products will run on one of four operating systems — Windows-lite, Chrome-OS, Intel/Wind-River, or an operating system yet to be named. If the netbook becomes big, a new market will begin and the competitive playing field will be level again. Firms will have to compete for business. In time the netbook will compete with the PC for sales, and that could be a good thing for the PC market too.
I want to see a competitive market again. I am going to remain slightly optimistic Chrome-OS is a small (early) step in the right direction.
“Digital electronics have evolved to the point whereby we could find very capable PC-like functionality being added to a variety of products. Chances are those products will run on one of four operating systems — Windows-lite, Chrome-OS, Intel/Wind-River, or an operating system yet to be named”
You’re kind of skipping around a few important players, like every mobile OS platform in use and the entire Mac thing. They’re very powerful, they’ve already taken on the challenges of a functional interface on a tiny screen and they have an installed base of useful software running on millions of machines. That counts for a lot.
But otherwise, you’re right that there’s been terrible stagnation in the desktop market and a good shake should help. Anything that makes MS uncomfortable, gets them away from defending Windows/Office and out there building something new is good news for consumers. Netbooks, unfortunately, have MS feeling good about their current Windows mobile offering and likely won’t get them moving.
Taking myself as a bellwether, it doesn’t bode well for Microsoft.
The next computer that I buy is very likely to be a netbook. I don’t want the OS to be Windows, and at the netbook price point (around $300 in my mind), I can afford to take a chance on another OS. I would love to try Linux, and it would be helpful if the netbook manufacturer picks the right distribution and setup for me.
If I was planning on spending $2k for another desktop, I would want an OS with the latest bells and whistles to do $2k worth of computing (which I honestly don’t need; my wife won’t let me go hog wild with gaming). That would most likely put me in the Windows camp (I could be convinced to switch to Apple).
But I don’t plan on spending $2k for my next computer.
I’m writing this from my Acer netbook, which I installed Ubuntu 8 on. I have been using Linux since ’95. Now, I pretty much have the wife and kids running Ubuntu and it just works for everything they do daily.
We still keep Windows around for some video games. That’s about it. Maybe Google can make a standard non-X video system that works nicely for games and heavier video?
I agree with much that has been said here… the value of having competition particularly, the relative strengths of the two companies, and the importance of Apple in the dynamic. Here are some nuances:
Google is more vulnerable, and Bing could easily displace enough Google income to cause large cutbacks on the Google side leading to a downward spiral of Google innovation, and more importantly, the Google infrastructure, which allows it to host so much content at prices so low that advertising can pay for it.
More importantly, who is Microsoft’s largest customer? Without seeing their books, it would almost certainly be the Federal government who buys thousands of copies of Windows and Office on a fairly regular basis for each of the thousands of smaller organizations that make it up. This forces the the purchase of those products by all the contractors working for the Federal government, all but forces States to follow suit, then localities, and then the myriad of companies doing business with those. If the federal government today announced a policy to use web based services over Windows (not necessarily Google, but perhaps using internal servers) then the Windows/Office franchise would be over in months, generating too little revenue for it to be worth Microsoft pursuing other than as a money losing side project such as Xbox.
This is, this could actually happen, and should. A server-centric OS and Office capability, even from Microsoft, would save billions of dollars in staffing costs for the federal government. It would initially produce far less revenue for whoever the vendor of these services might be too, but then it is a growing market, and as more people the world over use computers, one of the biggest disincentives is still the total cost of the proposition, which needs to come down one way or another.
Microsoft is said today to be announcing their own online alternative to Office. If not today, eventually, and when it happens it will mark the start of Microsoft eating into its own profit margins.
And THAT, my friends, is the importance of the Google moves, not just this one, but all of them . Google, Apple, and others, particularly web-based products have forced Microsoft to think outside of its comfort zone.
A few years ago a government executive could threaten to have me fired for suggesting any alternative to Windows/Office in any of the organizations meeting. Today, I don’t think that attitude would fly (nor should it have then, but it did). What individuals use at home, and what kids at schools are exposed to, and what the trade publications continue to drone on about has, eventually an overwhelming impact one what gets discussed in strategy sessions within our massive federal bureaucracy. Some day, just as the switch was flipped to favor Word over Wordperfect, our countries biggest “business” will wake up to an alternative to Windows (and it may well be a Microsoft alternative so as to stay in their comfort zone) but it is almost certainly true that that alternative will not be as profitable to Microsoft, while at the same time will have little or no effect on Google. Whatever Google can do to accelerate this shift is to their benefit.
The bigger shift, what the world, particularly China and India decide to do with their computing infrastructure is even more important in the long run and one thing is almost certain, that is that they will not buy the Windows/Office paradigm as it is currently constructed. As much as Microsoft doesn’t like the coming change, they will be forced to take part in it.
https://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1c2cfb40-6f09-11de-9109-00144feabdc0.html
Nicely reasoned. Good piece. Glad to see you’re still getting around.
But the main difference I noticed was… no typos!
What does Bing do?
It tries to put data into Context, hence the decision engine moniker. But the context is a shared context, broad enough to be good enough for many people.
What is the next step.
Tighten the context to more precision, which means more specialist for fewer people. To the point to be precise for one Person.
How do you do that? Use the local creation of information, doesn’t matter where it’s stored.
In other words 5 years from now Google better has access to the creation process or Bing will beat the crap out of Google search.
The problem for Google is it mirrored in NIH, where Microsoft keep it’s communications lines open for new research. Google needs an OS or the will be history.
Personal computers have been present in most homes in the developed world for a couple decades now. They should be mature enough to function like appliances. When I buy a new toaster, I don’t have to patch it. I don’t have to maintain it. I don’t have to worry about an attacker gaining remote access to it and using it to burn my house down. I just plug it in and it works.
Computers have had enough to time to reach that level of maturity, but they haven’t. There are a lot of reasons for this. The biggest one is that developers see the computer as a platform that is everything to everyone, and consumers see it as a platform that just does what they want it to do.
To its credit, Microsoft has been trying to make the PC more intuitive ever since Windows 2000, To its detriment, it has failed. Apple has also tried to do this, but the’re either failing or not trying to compete with Microsoft on price. Linux developers have beaten both on price and reliability, but have a history of failing miserably on making the user interface intuitive for non-experts.
It’s time somebody picked up the slack and delivered to consumers what they want: a computing platform that just works. Maybe Google isn’t focused on toppling Microsoft and claiming their spot as king of the mountain. Maybe Google just wants to give the world a cheap, reliable, and easy to use computer.
My toaster oven has three knobs. I use it to make toast, cook potatoes and an occasional fish. The toaster can generally be on or off only (although I have some minor control over how hot it gets).
My computer’s Intel Core Duo processor contains 151 million transistors (according to Wikipedia), each one of which can be off or on at any time. And that’s just the CPU. Keep counting to add in the RAM, hard disk, flat panel display, etc. On any given day, I am likely to use a web browser to look up information, a calendar to record appointments, an e-mail application to share photos of my son with his grandparents, a text editor to create source code, an interpreter or compiler to execute that code and a terminal application to submit jobs to a cluster of beefy computers and more.
If you have a brilliant idea for picking up the “slack” and creating a mature computing platform that “just works,” go right ahead and build it. I wouldn’t buy it, though, and I suspect not many others would either, unless you’re making it just as cheaply as my $20 toaster. Personally, I will be busy trying out new software and web services that the world has yet to imagine using a general-purpose computer for decades to come. I would argue that a large part of Apple’s success with the iPhone comes from taking a mature appliance (the phone) and turning it into a general-purpose tool. There is no such thing as an “average consumer,” and we all want something different from these devices.
Said it before, now will say it again.
1) M$ gets replaced when the PC platform gets replaced. The Netbook and the Phone may do that. Google certainly hopes so. M$ did not replace an existing entrant. It made its niche; well Lotus did with 1-2-3, but most who read this have either forgotten, or are too young to remember what the IBM-PC OS options were at the outset. I’m too tired to go through that again. May haps Bob can keep a perma-link to that bit of history.
2) M$ gets replaced if a Fortune X00 company gets sick and tired of bleeding money, and adopts some form of Linux.
3) ChromeOS only replaces Windoze if some Fortune X00 company goes Cloud. Not very likely.
4) Google has reason to fear being Netscaped. Perhaps a little less so now that Bushie is gone, but M$ could certainly get desperate enough to do it.
“3) ChromeOS only replaces Windoze if some Fortune X00 company goes Cloud. Not very likely”
I’m not so sure. A lot of corporations are still running IE6 because they have critical web-based apps that aren’t compatible with anything else. That’s basically going Cloud, although they did it before the term existed. Eventually they will have to retire those apps and re-create them, and they might not be so keen on sticking with Microsoft after their IE6 experience.
Won’t happen overnight, but I wouldn’t rule it out, especially once MS stops supporting XP. I doubt you can run IE6 in Vista or 7.
Bob, nice piece, but I wonder about your belief that real innovation only stems from startups. I’m a great advocate of startups – I’ve spent my entire career involved in the creation of new technologies, so I want to agree. Would that this were true, but life is a bit more complicated than that.
Having been one of the major pioneers in open source operating systems, yes we did it without any money from a corporate interest. And yes, that meant we did not have to support a corporate viewpoint of legacy products so we were free to innovate. And we did.
But let’s get real. The only reason we were able to get the word out was because we had the support of a strong popular trade press magazine (Dr. Dobbs Journal) which was widely read in the tech community. We focused on the DOS crowd with our 17-part “Porting Unix to the 386” series, and taught people how to roll their own OS – and people like Linus Torvalds were able to take advantage of this to create Linux. We ended up releasing the entire OS publicly (once Berkeley made most of the source available – we finished it off and made it work) for people to use, and did radical new work released via the magazine.
In sum, what we lacked in investment we were able to make up for in terms of reputation and credentials. This allowed people to follow along steadily as we built the case for open source operating systems (a difficult project in and of itself), taught people the “practice” of a port, introduced many novel mechanisms such as layers of abstraction, multitasking and the life cycle of a process to people used to single-tasking jump table engineering (remember, while the average DDJ reader was a very smart engineer, this was *not* a Unix crowd) in an ever-escalating manner more in keeping with the serial novels of Dickens than the “instant-on” product launches of today. It took a lot of patience on the part of the reader *and* the authors (not to mention the magazine) before we were able to supply them with the finished unencumbered work – 386BSD.
With the collapse of publishing and the advent of 24/7 instant gratification, there is no longer that ability to slowly and methodically build that case for new innovations in operating systems. Yes, Windows is lousy – I face it every day myself. And yes, the alternatives are not the panaceas everyone had hoped for, with flaws and user incompatibilities galore.
But if you go talk to a VC in Silicon Valley where I live (get him drunk first, and yes, it’s almost always a “him”), and get a straight answer, the belief is that nobody can outfund a Microsoft with a startup in the OS arena, and doing the “grassroots” approach like we did with 386BSD is no longer possible because it is too easy to undermine. For just as the Internet is a powerful mechanism for distribution of good ideas, it is an equally powerful mechanism for the distribution of bad ideas. Jealous of a rival? Badmouth him. Ridicule the work. Ruin the experience.
So I think you must look to the Googles of this world for anything new in the way of innovation. Most assuredly it is a slower path than the excitement of the 1990’s with open source. But it is a path – and that is something.
Google’s vaunted search is not invulnerable, what Google really has is their map engine+data which they rebuild for over 100 platforms. If you’ve ever used the T-Mobile G1 you know how great this is.
Bing is a dagger at Google’s heart. Chrome OS is more like a feather at Microsoft’s chest.
What was IBM and the 7 dwarfs is now Microsoft and the Google & Apple dwarfs. Whatever happened to those original 7 dwarfs? They either exited computing or exited existence. Google is on thin ice, look how fast they overtook Yahoo, why can’t that happen to them?
As to the company that will destroy Microsoft hasn’t been founded yet, alas I tend to believe this. Just as IBM struggles on as an aging behemoth, with no cro-magnon tribes to spear them out of their misery, so too Microsoft Windows and Office is too embedded in our public and private bureaucracies to vanish.
Maybe third world computing, which is embracing open source software as a way to stick it to intellectual imperialism, is heading down a new path, but the first world has completely embraced and extended Microsoft’s dominance. I don’t expect to outlive that.
John R.
“And don’t forget Apple, which with the iPod and iPhone has shown an ability to revolutionize markets other companies saw as mature. Microsoft and Google have yet to do something like that.”
Interesting article, but I think I have to disagree with the point above. Most people thought “Search” was pretty mature when Google came along and grabbed most of the market.
I wuold have to disagree, search was mature to a point. At the advent of google, i remember that searching was not reliable, you would have to try three different engines to be sure you would get to the pages you wanted to reach. Google revolutionised that, they where in control of the indexing and not the site owners meta describtions. That made google reliable and gave the correct results. Now thats not how they started to earn money, thats the history of GoogleAds and so on.
Today Google might not be the only provider of correct results, but hey they are a part of our culture in so many ways, you dont say “I searched for x”, you say “I googled x”. If some one asks you something and you don’t know the answer you tell them to “google it”. Bing is’nt the first flashy search engine to come along, i remember a couple the last 3 years that where so called google-killers, but to be frank, I cant even recall their names.
As a regular NYT reader who could not comment on your article on NYT (comments not enabled) .. i felt compelled to “google” ur blog and write here.
You are so OFF BASE, i cant believe you can write for NYT. It seems you have no idea how technology works. Microsoft can disable google search??? where do u get that idea? they would have to disable HTML to do that. When we make hypotheticals, lets please stay in touch with some sense of reality.
And you think Google does not really want to displace windows with ChromeOS ?? how naieve is it for you to say that they would want to keep windows alive because thats where most of google searches originate… as if windows will be replaced by typewriters which cant reach internet. Whatever replaces windows will do google searches at-least with same efficiency if not better. Its not like if windows goes out of business, people will stop using computers or internet.
> Microsoft can disable google search??? where do u get that idea?
> they would have to disable HTML to do that.
Microsoft could easily disable Google. Example: With the next Windows patch, any attempt to browse to “google.com” in Internet Explorer causes a redirect to “bing.com”. Done.
I doubt my mom would even notice the difference.
I’m in the same boat as the other NYT Reader — couldn’t comment there, so I googled you, because I have to express just how wrong you are.
You do make a few valid statements here and there, but your conclusion — that the consumer won’t benefit from competition — doesn’t make any sense. Anything that weakens Microsoft’s lock on the browser market or forces them to innovate has the potential to help consumers. Why? Ask any developer working on web applications what their biggest headache is. Chances are, it’s Internet Explorer. This isn’t just Microsoft-bashing. This is economics. Since M$ refuses to release a browser that can equal either of the major open source offerings, we’re left spending 80% of our development time on hacks and workarounds to get things to work in IE. And since M$ has so badly botched the upgrade path for Windows, there are now three very different versions of IE to support. Even the latest version (IE8) is missing many standards-compliant features that Firefox and Safari have had for years. Think about it. The Safari browser on an iPhone has more features and is more stable than the latest version of Internet Explorer running on a full size desktop. M$ has been unable to keep up.
This is the biggest thing holding back innovation on the web today. IE has approximately 65% of the market share today. Say Google can chip away another 10%. At this point it starts to seem pretty stupid for web companies to waste 80% of their development time supporting a browser that only has half the market.
So, there are two likely scenarios that could develop from this. 1) IE continues to fade away into irrelevance, or 2) M$ wakes up and finally catches up to the competition. Either way, the consumer is likely to benefit because it will be possible to create better web products.
Even if a third company comes out of nowhere and destroys Google and Microsoft, your conclusion is wrong.
Bob, I enjoyed the article. However, it should be emphasized that Google’s primary source of income is *managing web advertising” for corporate clients, not selling ad links on search.google.com.
Google provides a wide and deep array of advertising analytics that put Nielsen and all other ad evaluators to shame. And they’re the primary deliverer of web ads. (Those vast Google server farms do much more than web searches.) Their lead in web ads is incomparably ahead of anyone else, and fields perhaps 70% of the on-line advertising marketplace. Google dominates web revenue the way that M$ dominates the PC laptop/desktop.
Which form of domination is more vulnerable? Can I see Bing or Microsoft ads ever posing a serious threat to Google’s main revenue stream? No. Can I see web apps or pervasive/cloud computing posing a threat to M$ dominance on the laptop/desktop (be they from Google or others)? Yes. The rise of portable, omnipresent, web-attached hardware is coming (witness smartphones, netbooks, Kindles, and crackberrys). Microsoft will not dominate those media. No one company can dominate the software or hardware of pervasive/cloud computing than any one can dominate web content.
But if one company is likely to take market share from the others, I’d bet on Google. Not only are they hungrier and smarter than today’s Microsoft, more importantly, they’re likely to waste less time trying to protect moribund cash cows that have already begun to wheeze.
Bob,
The thin air must be getting to you out there at the Grand Canyon (I’m jealous) 🙂
For years you’ve written that everything Google/Apple/etc is an existential threat to Microsoft. Now suddenly you contradict yourself and say it’s all irrelevant. You must be in vacation mode this week.
Google is not playing games with this. To grow their search business they want to reduce the cost of internet-capable devices. Lower cost = more units sold = more searches. Thus, they have a huge stake in the adoption of free phones and low-cost netbooks. The cost of netbooks is constrained by windows, which needs beefier hardware and has an expensive license.
Microsoft is not joking either. Their last quarter was a revenue LOSS compared to the year ago period. The reason they gave was netbooks — because XP netbooks have a lower license fee, or are non windows.
Cloud computing hurts Microsoft also. There was a Wall Street Journal article recently explaining that online software is much less profitable than local installed. They mentioned that Salesforce.com was the only company known to be profitable (a tiny profit). If Microsoft is forced to sell office online, it will likely be at a huge discount to their current licensing. They know it. They will fight this as hard as they can.
Get back on your game, Bob.
For the record, Bing was a very deliberate choice as a name, it really does mean Bing Is Not Google, the engineers were slightly showing a bit of recursive geek humor, like RMS using GNU for Gnus Not Unix.
Whoa, correction, I got three e-mails from my MSFT engineer friends saying this name was bestowed by marketing not the engineers. But the meaning of the names is accurate, it is the recursive, BING IS NOT GOOGLE.
Your editorial is polemic and it seems not aimed at an actual state of being for either Google or Microsoft, nor allowing for much complexity. I would imagine such large companies have massive R & D, most of which doesn’t result in unique ideas or products. Everybody’s working on some variation of the same things, hoping their model will stick. Good chance, as you point out, that a single-focus upstart will create something to topple the old guard, but, as one of your more astute commenters pointed out, the larger companies have greater advantage to compete with one another in the current environment.
Bing may be a better search engine, in fact, but its Achilles heel is map search, which Apple just made essential on phones (GPS and compass now included on iPhones), thus tightening Google’s hold on iPhone search. Google Maps is a mature and complex Ajax application that’s easy to use and tied tightly to product search. MS maps (what do they call them now?) can’t even be dragged to see a view beyond the map edge, and are clunky, awkward implementations of otherwise good data (but just don’t try to get a street view).
Certainly Apple is Google’s competitor, too, and, perhaps another lobe of this multi-limbed situation has Google both besting MS, and hedging its bets against Apple’s complete dominance. Apple’s Snow Leopard will arrive this Fall, and is a lean and optimized *nix-based system that, of course, runs on both Intel (and no longer PPC) and ARM hardware, including the iPhone. Google, even with all of its resources, won’t have as mature an operating system for at least three to five years, by which time the netbook will have been far outdistanced by an iPhone variation that will make speculation about Apple netbooks and tablets seem silly (which, frankly, the current iPhone OS & hardware already do).
King Kong vs. Godzilla is a great story. But it’s also not true.
Just a correction to something Robert Hume said here in comments: There was never an Excel for DOS. The Microsoft DOS offering in this area was another, more primitive spreadsheet entirely, called Multiplan.
Multiplan was the precursor to Excel and it also had a GUI interface when used on the original Mac in 1984-85. Excel and Word were both originally made for the Mac and later ported to Windows.
As for platforms, the desktop computer will eventually be replaced by the handheld computer. Apple has a huge head start in that area with the iPhone/iPod touch. Google, RIM and Palm are gearing up to join the fight. Microsoft doesn’t have a dog in this hunt yet. When will they produce a decent mobile OS?
Microsoft doesn’t have a dog in this hunt yet. When will they produce a decent mobile OS?
They have to throw out current mobile OS and start completely from scratch. If they’d get a clue, they’d at least base it on a stable Unix out there – a BSD or (gasp!) Linux implementation (Red Hat, anyone?).
ARM may, just may, be able to put a crimp in Intel, too. The death of the Wintel monopoly would be heartwarming.
google bada-bing
Google is also a very fiscally smart company. They horde cash and build infrastructure cheap and reap benefits from it. Their money-losers aren’t in vain; the cool ones are kept for branding and strategic purposes (maps, gmail) and the rest scrapped for losses that never add up to, say, what MS has lost in MSNBC alone. Of course MS has pyramids of cash too, but they’re terribly wasteful at every level.
As others have noted, hardware is going mobile. Think about a portable hard drive ten years ago compared to a 50g thumb drive today. Netbooks are not a trend; the name may change but portable computing is the future and the weight of the OS economy is going to shift too. When your iPhone has the computing power of a top-end desktop, you won’t need a desktop. Your office will have a paper-thin LED monitor, and a five-dollar keyboard. Your iPhone/Netbook/Whatever which weighs 50g and goes with you everywhere will go in between. MS is the lagging player in this OS market behind Apple and several others including Google.
As someone else noted, your mom won’t buy a computer “Powered By Linux” but she will totally buy one “Powered by Google.” Even it’s the same.
Finally, Google’s real strength is not search. It’s data analytics and real-time marketing. Search is just the way they get the data and distribute the analytics at the moment. If they lose search dominance they will go to any of several Plan Bs that monetize their totally unrivalled ability to serve the marketing economy, which will never go away. People who think Google is Bing-killable don’t see the gears. By comparison MS has a weaker hand — an app platform that depends on inertia. It’s a cash cow for now but what’s their plan B?
Bing-o. Right on about the mobile + “docking” stratgey. My dinky (dual boot) netbook comes home, plugs into the TV and an external keyboard, and I’m ready to get to work (or play / watch movies). It does 90% of what I need, and I can get at other machines to do the other 10% from it.
Of course, right now I’m just sitting on the couch w/out all the external gear.
In fact I think the mobile docking strategy SHOULD have already happened to the market by now, because of the Moore’s-Law speed of hardware improvement and decrease in size. But it hasn’t –why? Possibly because MS has continually upgraded the CPU demands to run their ever-more bloated OS?
I disagree with Bob in that I think Google is more serious about this than he thinks. Offering the consumer a cheaper faster netbook with an easy Google OS (that’s free) and nudging data into the cloud, if successful, has massive implications.
1) It divorces MS from the hardware makers
2) It advances the “smaller and more powerful” level of all hardware by two generations instantly
3) It changes the consumer’s idea of what an OS is or needs
4) It changes the consumer’s idea of where data should be stored
Again it may not actually succeed, and Google has surely already planned for its failure (as they always do, unlike MS) but if it works then Google will be killing the current market for
1) Windows
2) Office
3) Desktop PCs
4) Hard drives
The biggest benefactor of this (besides Google)? Apple/HTC/RIM, followed by Asus/Acer/HP/Samsung/Toshiba, followed by telecoms, wifi ISPs, and maybe satellite companies.
A final note — for those who don’t trust the cloud, the fact that SanDisk just came out with a 100G thumb drive suggests you won’t have to.
I have never clicked on a sponsored link. They are clutter to me. Google will have to trick me into clicking on one by stealthily merging them into the results list. (Assuming those links have different placement techniques than the voodoo and cash needed to get an artificially high ranking.)
If you’re using any Google product, Google is making some profit off you that you aren’t aware. It isn’t all about clicky links.
As usual I agree with most of what you said, but what really bugged me was something simple.
“I wish these companies had more guts, that either would make a true bet-the-company investment in changing the world, but they won’t. Google engineers are allowed to spend 20 percent of their time on new ideas — yet of those thousands of ideas, the company can really invest in only a dozen per year, leading to dissatisfaction and defections as the best nerds leave to pursue their dreams.”
Rob, please stop using the term “nerds”. I’m not a nerd or a geek or any other vernacular – I’m a professional. You wouldn’t refer people to your Doctor or Lawyer by saying, “Go visit my quack” or “You should use my shyster”; why is it acceptable to use these derogatory terms for fellow information professionals?
I really wish you’d comment on this phenomena some time, I find things like this and the recent spate of AppRiver and Best Buy “Geek Squad” ads offensive to say the least.
You need to chill out and check out this legitimate web site: http://www.iwanttobeaneard.com .
You ever hear of empowerment? Embrace the word nerd, make it yours, make it work for you not against you, otherwise you’re just a whiny geek.
Of course the customer wins. Do I need to remind you of the “Microsoft Tax”? MS strong-arms PC makers into bundling Windows, the cost of which is passed-on to the customer. Chrome OS is supposedly going to be free.
Hardcore gamers and other power users may still prefer to keep buying Windows, and even the business world may be reluctant to switch for some time. But your average home user isn’t going to care, and will certainly be lured by lower price-tags. This may even eventually erode Microsoft’s market-share in the other categories.
I don’t mind so much that Google’s motives here are self-serving, because someone may finally start to keep Microsoft in-check. And who knows, MS may respond to Google by severely cutting the price of Windows, or maybe by making that free too. And maybe we can finally get past their ridiculous strangle-hold on hardware compatibility by way of the OS.
I had another thought on this today. Sometimes we have a tendency to look at things from a purely technical point of view. There could be a perfectly plausible BUSINESS explanation for Chrome-OS. Suppose you were a Dell, or HP, or Lenovo, or whoever and was seriously interested in Netbook products. By now you have had 25+ years of doing business with Microsoft. If you had a choice to use or not use Microsoft software in your next product, what would you do? I don’t know who started the Chrome OS idea. If I were a hardware maker and had a chance to gain some independence from Microsoft, I’d encourage Google to pursue the idea.
Maybe this isn’t a Google vs Microsoft thing, or who has the best technology… Maybe this is something bigger. Maybe it is the beginning of Microsoft’s customers turning on them.
Many years ago I observed many firms did more damage to themselves than Microsoft did to them. Maybe it won’t be a new company with a new idea that hurts Microsoft. Maybe it is Microsoft’s business practice ideas, or Microsoft’s own culture that does the most damage.
Good article, I thought you were going to buy into the hype and you didn’t. I do have to quibble with your assertion that Microsoft can disable Google search. As NYT Reader said above, no way they’d get away with that. All iterations of Microsoft’s search have sucked, I found Bing to be a step backwards from live.com. Google has shown no indication that they know what they’re doing in operating systems or office apps. They have some nice tech with Chrome and their native client NaCl extension but their choices are often fundamentally flawed. The web stack will be superceded by something better, they don’t seem to understand this and keep trying to incrementally inch HTML and javascript forward instead. Linux will flame out in the coming years cuz the GPL is self-limiting. Microsoft owns the operating system and office apps and Google owns search, that’s it for now. They won’t even keep those if they keep making the dumb decisions they’re making.
This was a good article. One thing you may want to consider is the Peloponnesian War. One side had a great navy, the other an amazing army. The victor was ultimately the empire who was best able to copy its adversary.
Is it just me – or have your last 2 blog entries both pointed to the same article in the NYT. Getting paid per page-view perchance? Should we expect to see the same link in the next entry?
my initial test result shows that Bing is as good as Google when displaying relevant search results. Google might be having a tough competitor with Microsofts own search engine.
Microsoft Bing would be the closet competitor of Google. but i still use Google because it shows more relevant results on the serp.
Bing does give search results much like Google but i would have to say that Google still gives more relevant search results
i am using both Bing and Google and i think both search engines give relevant search results. i would still prefer Google though, because it gives a little bit more relevant search results than Bing.
i am a user of Microsofts BING search engine and it is as good as google search. for searching blogs, i think google gives more relevant search results compared bing.
my default search engine is Yahoo but now i am using BING because it is much better than Yahoo. i heard that Bing search engine would power Yahoo search also.
i think that Bing is not as good as Google. Google would still index new websites faster than Bing. Microsoft would still need a lot of catching to do with GoogleBot.
I use Bing and Google whenever i want to find something on the internet. I think that both search engines are very good. .
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Bing is a good search engine but Google edges a little bit better*”*
i would have to say that Google is slightly better than Bing search engine.”*
What a great blog, thank you for letting me comment on it.
the bing search engine seems to be a great competition to google”~-
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