The amount of fumbles is monumental.
Even then usage of AJAX declined rather slowly as it was so established, and indeed even now it's still used by many websites!
Before the invention of the xmlhttprequest there was so little you could do with JS most dynamic content was some version of shifty tricks with iframes or img tags or anything that could trigger the browser to make a server request to a url that you could generate dynamically.
Fetch was the formalization of the xmlhttprequest (hence the use of xhr as the name of the request type ). Jquery wrapped it really nicely and essentially popularized (they may have invented async js leveraging callbacks and the like), the creation of promises was basically the formalization and standardization of this.
So AJAX itself is in fact used almost in the entire totality of the web, the term has become irrelevant given the absolute domination of the technology.
"It was probably Office Web Apps. It was a web-based office suite that was introduced in 2008. It included Word Web App, Excel Web App, Powerpoint Web App, and OneNote Web App. It was not SharePoint, but it was based on SharePoint technology."
Wild that we have to ask these questions.
Plus it's point in time - I'm sending you the document as it is now, and I might start cutting it about or changing it after to send to someone else, but this the version I want to send you.
Google Analytics - acquired 2004, renamed from Urchin Analytics
Google Docs - acquired 2004, renamed from Writely
Youtube - acquired 2005
Android - acquired, 2005 (Samsung have done more to advance the OS than Google themselves)
2008 is late to the party for a docs competitor! Microsoft got the runaround by Google and after Google launched docs they could have clobbered Microsoft which kind of failed to respond properly in kind, but they didn’t push the platform hard enough to eat the corporate market share, and didn’t follow up with a share point alternative that would appeal to the enterprise, and kind of blew the opportunity imo.
I mean to this day Google docs is free but it still hasn’t unseated Word in the marketplace, but the real killer app that keeps office on top is Excel, which some companies built their entire tooling around.
It’s crazy interesting to look back and realize how many twists there were leading us to where we are today.
Btw it was Office Server or Sharepoint Portal earlier (this is like Frontpage days so like 2001?) and Microsoft called it Tahoe internally. I don’t think it became Sharepoint until Office 365 launched.
The XMLHTTP object launched in 2001 and was part of the dhtml wave. That gave a LOT of the capabilities to browsers that we currently see as browser-based word processing, but there were efforts with proprietary extensions going back from there they just didn’t get broad support or become standards. I saw some crazy stuff at SGI in the late 90s when I was working on their visual workstation series launch.
1. Poor Google Drive interface makes managing documents difficult.
2. You cannot just get a first class Google Doc file which you can then share with others over email, etc. Very often you don’t want to just share a link to a document online.
3. Lack of desktop apps.
So why did they never release that and went with Office 365 instead?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/netdocs-microsofts-net-poster-...
A product requires commitment, it requires grind. That 10% is the most critical one, and Google persistently refuses to push products across the finish line, just giving up on them and adding to the infamous Google Product Graveyard.
Honestly, what is the point? They could just maintain the core search/ads and not pay billions of dollars for tens of thousands of expensive engineers who have to go through a bullshit interview process and achieve nothing.
It's a way to strangle the competition. But also not good for the industry in general.
tech was based on an acquired company, Google just abused their search monopoly to make it more popular(same thing they did with YT). This has been the strategy for every service they've ever made, Google really hasn't launched a decent in-house product since Gmail and even that was grown using their search monopoly as free advertising
>Google Docs originated from Writely, a web-based word processor created by the software company Upstartle and launched in August 2005
What about Chrome? And Chromebooks?
https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/display...
The process model was the novel selling point at the time from my memory [1].
Which uses the WebKit engine and is kindof a showcase for Safari, granted, but it still exists as distinct browser under that name.
This is what Google has always cared about. Bring application to the billions of users.
People are forgetting Google is the most profitable AI company in the world right now. All of their products use ML and AI.
So who is losing?
The goal of Gemini isn't to build a chatbot like ChatGPT despite Google having Bard.
The goal for Gemini is to integrate it into those 10 products they have with a billion users.
Is that supposed to be a vote of confidence for the current state of Google search?
> So who is losing?
The people who use their products, which are worse than they’ve been in decades? The people who make the content Google now displays without attribution on search results?
Shopped it around VCs. Got laughed out of all the meetings. "Companies storing their documents on the Internet?! You're out of your mind!"
Globe dot com was basically Facebook, but the critical mass wasn't there. Nor were the smartphones.
And this business is so totally different to Google in every way imaginable.
Senior Managers love customer support, SLAs - Google loves automation. Two worlds collide.
Good if you want someone else to google the error message for you though.
Garbage in = garbage out.
If Google cannot deign to assign internal resources and staffing towards providing first-party support for paid products, it's not a good choice over the competition. You're not going to beat the incumbent (Office 365) by skimping on customer service.
Word and Excel have been dominant since the early 1980s. Google has never had a real shot in the space.
[0] yes, not literally nobody. I know about the Windows 2.0 Excel or whatever, but the user base compared to WordPerfect or 1-2-3 was tiny up until MS was able to start driving them out by leveraging Windows in the early-mid 90s.
Google has the problem that it's typically the first to encounter a problem, and it has the resources to approach it (from search), but the incentive to monetize it (to get away from depending entirely on search revenue). And, management.
An AI product that makes search irrelevant is an existential threat, but I don’t think Google has the product DNA to pull off a replacement product for search themselves. I heard Google has been taken over by more business / management types, but it is still missing product as a core pillar.
They can't do anything that threatens their main income. They are tied to ads and ads technology, and can't do anything about it.
Microsoft had a crisis and that drives focus. Google... they probably mistreat their good employees if they don't work on ads.
The amount of data that is collected by these cars is massive.
AI is a threat there, but it'd require an AI company to transform the culture of Internet use to stop people 'Googling', and that will require two things: something significantly better than Google Search that's worth switching to, and a company that is willing to reject whatever offer Google makes to buy it. Neither is very likely.
Also "interesting" to see the if results being SEO spam generated using AI will keep seo search viable.
Nadella is an all time great CEO. Pichai is an uninspired MBA-type.
The difference is Nadella is a good CEO and Pichai isn’t.
Part of it could also be a result of circumstance. Nadella came at a time when MS was foundering and he had to make what appeared to be fairly obvious decisions (pivot to cloud…he was literally picked because of this, and reducing dependence on Windows…which was an obvious necessary step for the pivot to cloud). Pichai OTOH was selected to run Google when it was already doing pretty well. His biggest mandate was likely to not upset the Apple cart.
If roles were reversed, I suspect Nadella would still have been more successful than Pichai, but you never know. I’d Nadella introduction to the CEO job was to keep things going as they were, and Pichai’s was to change the entire direction of the company, maybe a decade later Pichai would have been the aggressive decision maker whereas Nadella would have been the overly cautious guy making canned demos.
Of all the things, this.
I use both Google and Microsoft office products. One thing that strikes you is just how feature rich Microsoft products are.
Google doesn't look like is serious about making money.
I squarely blame rockstar product managers and OKRs for this. Not everything can be a 1000% profitable product built in the next quarter. A lot of things require small continuous improvement and care over years.
Under Eric Schmidt they were engineer-driven, during the golden era of the 2000s. Nowadays they're MBA driven, which is why they had 4 different messaging apps from different product managers.
Also, "had." Google cleaned things up. They still sometimes do stuff just cause, but it's a lot less now. I still feel like Meet using laggy VP9 (vs H.264 like everyone else) is entirely due to engineer stubbornness.
Procuring Azure is a good option for lots of companies because most companies' IT staff know AD and Microsoft in general, and Microsoft's cloud offers them a way to use the same (well, not the same, but it's too late by then) tools to manage their company IT.
I'm not disagreeing with its success, but I do think they had a much simpler journey, as to my understanding a lot of it involved cloudifying their locked-in enterprise customers, rather than diversifying into new markets.
I also don't see anything big Google has leveraged Android for, besides Pixel, which is actually more to cement Android cause they know they don't have enough control with software alone. At least I have decent amount of faith in them pulling that off.
And I hate Teams personally, but lots of teams use it.
I bet most team members who switched from Slack to Microsoft Teams do not feel like they consented or were asked for their opinions beforehand.
I agree with your general post but I disagree with this. Tesla's FSD is so far behind Google it's almost negligent on the part of Tesla despite having so much more data.
What would the ideal setup in your opinion?
Besides collaborative reuniting is a no feature and there is much more important stuff than this for a word processor to be useful.
I know that MS Teams is a more full-featured product suite, but even at companies that used it, we still used Zoom for meetings.
In addition meet insists I click on the same about 4 or 5 different "Got it" feature popups every single call, and every call also insists on asking me if I want to use Duet AI to make my background look shit which just adds to annoyance.
Sure, Teams is a steaming pile of crap to use day-to-day as a chat app, the search is slow and vague - and depending on policy, probably links you to messages that no longer exist in the archive lol. Oh you want to download message history? Nah gotta get an admin to do that bruh.
The only saving grace is that members who can't deal with it are using local MS Office, which has some integrations with 365, thus making it kinda viable. But I feel like it's still a net negative.
I base about 50% of my choice of employer on what they choose in that area.
If you have a problem there’s no one available to help you.
On the MS side they will literally pull an engineer who is writing the code for the product you have a problem for to help resolve the issue if you’re large enough.
The part you see in your browser isn’t the only part of the product a company has to buy. In fact, it’s not even the most expensive bit. If you see the most expensive plans for most SAAS products (ie the enterprise plans) almost the entire difference in costs is driven by support illustrating the importance and value of support.
Google unfortunately is awful at this.
Well, that is trully shocking.
We'll get a definitive answer in a few years. Til then, OpenAI benefits from the $ value from their end of products, MSFT eats the compute costs, but also gets a stock bump.