Microsoft Silverlight vs Google Wave: Why Karma Matters
blogs.zoho.com
blogs.zoho.com
Google has a conference, well known to all and sundry. Google plans a big reveal. Microsoft plans a big reveal to steal some thunder. Normal PR all around.
But look at the scope of the two reveals. Google essentially plans to reboot the entire mechanism of interpersonal interaction on the internet. Whether it will ever work, catch on, or even be useful it's without question astonishingly ambitious. Arrogant even. "We're so smart we'll tell you how you should be talking to each other." Love, hate, angry blog posts are generated in abundance.
Microsoft launches a new search engine. Which, to be fair, seems like a quite nice new search engine. But where's the ambition? Where's the absolutely insane, balls-out wtf? Even if the Zune was better than the iPod it would be a clone. Even if Bing is better than Google it'll be a clone. Even if the Xbox is better than the Playstation it still won't be qualitatively different. Sure some of them may succeed and none will likely fail completely but it's hard to see the ambition in any of them.
Sure innovation is great. That's why we're all at HN right?! But the big money (short of creating a whole new industry) is about getting market share in established markets. That is what MS are doing - from Bing to Silverlight to Xbox to most other things they do. Nothing more or less.
Why is it that the big money is there to eek out a Nth of a percent but not available for fresh big ideas? I'm not at all disagreeing with you, I just think that's an interesting point. I wish the world were the other way around it might be a better place (or maybe there'd just be less "big money" for having tried). Maybe if MS let smaller groups run wild more often they'd see more of these elusive "innovative ideas".
They are not a creative company (or as Jobs would have it they have no taste - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upzKj-1HaKw ).
Their business does not revolve around creating new things but about copying and improving things that already exist in the market. And to be fair, this strategy has worked out quite well for them so far, so why would they change course?
I'm sure they have done some great work, but it is hard to look at their track record and figure out how much of their success was earned on the merits of their products and how much was earned on the "merits" of their business practices.
Again, I'm saying that it is hard to look at their success and disentangle their products's merits from their business practices.
Remember the story of Microsoft and Lotus? Microsoft Excel won because it was a better product. Nothing revolutionary. Just better. Microsoft Word eventually replaced Wordperfect. Where are those companies today?
DO I miss-recall that moment in history when Microsoft's applications lept ahead of everyone else simultaneously?
Microsoft was heavily invested in OS/2 as well. Just had the courage to ditch the platform when Windows was gaining market.
Point is: you don't have to leap ahead of everyone or be super innovative. Just make products that are useful and provide some advantage over the competitors (another example is the Flip video camera).
I remember that. I also remember that Excel was limited to using no more than 1MB of RAM. When they ported Excel to Windows, they fixed that so it could use as much RAM as your machine had, but strangely they didn't fix the Mac version. So, if you wanted to use Excel for very large spreadsheets, you had to use the Windows version or you had to go with a different Mac product.
But of course, if you wanted to share docs within an office, you would go with Excel and then gradually the Mac users in the office would be forced to switch to Windows :-)
The WFT is in the scope of where Microsoft competes. Microsoft is competing with Google on search, Apple on OS and MP3 players, Sony and Nintendo on Game consoles, with open source on programming languages and Office Suites, Oracle and IBM in Databases, Logitech and Kensington on input devices, VMWare and Xen in virtualization... The list goes on and on and on.
MSFT actually has a foot in the door at least in almost _every_ software market and some hardware markets. That's seriously WTF as far as I'm concerned. That's ambition far beyond what any other company is trying to do as far as I'm concerned.
While I may or may not agree on your point at large, the complete Xbox package (the Xbox 360 software, Xbox live etc) is clearly superior to anything Sony can produce. I don't care about the PS3 having provenly more capable hardware, when everything I care about is better on the Xbox 360.
If you are going to flag an example, try an example which doesn't prove your point wrong next time.
Edit: To do my best to avoid a console war, let me make it clear that I own both an Xbox 360 and a PS3. I realize my opinion is clearly not 100% objective, but sales-figures alone should to some extent back my point.
Xbox is an example where it worked out, that probably won't be the case with search.
While Microsoft may have some great technology in their portfolio, I simply don't want to use much of it because of how little I can trust them.
In Google's case, they're not really asking me to trust them so much, by documenting and open sourcing many of the technologies they're trying to push, I can at least feel like I have some degree of protection.
If there was a 'Google Silverlight' (as hypothesised in the article) it would probably be under consideration as a platform for the next version of my product but Microsoft's Silverlight falls very much short.
What do folks here think?
The crucial point is the one that he glosses over in the last sentence in the second-to-last paragraph; that Microsoft's incentives aren't aligned with Zoho, while Google's are. Google has every incentive in the world to get more people on the Web and make the Web a more powerful platform. In the end, Google has an incredibly powerful, benevolent brand, but they act in the way any rational corporation will.
.NET might be a very powerful and complete software platform that lots of people rely on.. but it's still a proprietry piece of technology that requires (and maybe even demands) putting a great deal of trust in Microsoft's hands.
He makes this point clear in his discussion of Silverlight. He's not dismissing it on technical merit (where it may have plenty) but on the different approaches Microsoft and (in a hypothetical world) Google would take to it.
Microsoft was to other OS and software vendors in the past, what Google is to Microsoft now. They're just using more open policies for some of their products to gain an advantage for their core business.
Don't get me wrong, i'm not calling either company good or evil.
I'm also undecided whether a company can be good or evil. There's illegal and unethical, sure but good and evil just depend on how you view a company's motivation.
Microsoft's goal is to keep you in their ecosystem, Google's goal is to sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder.
In Google's case, promoting their "Don't Be Evil" allows them to keep a pristine rapport with the media,which in turn helps to promote their eye-ball centric products. In Microsoft's case, selling the "developers developers developers" ideal allows them to keep their lock-in of a vast share of the enterprise software market.
Here's a thought.
Msft know their goal: Keep you in their ecosystem. This has been their goal forever. The market for OS/Office & the rest of their old products, was pretty much destined to grow over 20 years. Keep your 90% share of a growing market and you grow.
Google don't know their goal. They make money on search. Search works and they still have power. They're still not making much from platforms or webapps or online publishing or any of the other noteworthy things they do good work on.
The search business is pretty much at perfection right know. But the odds that search will be (a) as important in ten years and (b) exclusive Google property in ten years is not a 1/100 bet. The strategy for increasing the odds in Google's favour is not clear. While they might imporve the monetisation slightly, I don't think the search market will grow that much. Keep your 90% share of a flat market and you don't grow much grow. You can still lose market share though.
Maybe this accounts for part of the difference between the two.
AFAIK Google didn't hand over any user info to chinese authorities. They just merely censored the results. Between getting no access to google and having censored results, even if i was chinese I would have preferred getting the censored version.Why? because google is not used to find the censored topics. It is used more widely to get information on non censored topics. The loss of the world's biggest search engine would have been quite bad.
Also, google stood up to the US authorities when they demanded handing over user info while yahoo and MS happily handed it over.
So in my eyes, google has not screwed over its users or its partners. The biggest crime they may have committed is pulling the plug on some services ot letting some rot (feedburner). But those are free services and if it doesn't generate profit for them, they are right to pull the plug. In most of the cases they allowed the user enough time to get their data off the pulled service.
You can bash google for all you want but I think it is on very flimsy grounds.
Google has everything on the web. They can change whatever they want whenever they want and since it is web-based, you will have no option but adopt to whatever changes they have decided they want to go trough with. If they decide to obsolete a product, you no longer have access to it. You're pretty much on your own when it comes to replacing whatever you just lost.
With Microsoft it's all on your server. If they decide to change, alter or obsolete anything, it's up to you to keep up with them. If you don't approve of changes, you can remain on the platform you are currently running, if that makes you happy. While not free of risk, it at least lets you remain in control of what you are running.
In short, depending on either of them involves risks, and what you consider to be least acceptable is entirely up to you, your business and your priorities.