Google mocks Bing and the stuff behind it
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
1) they ignore you 2) they laugh at you 3) they fight you 4) you win
Let's hope they never get beyond 2.
The famous "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" is not an authentic Gandhi quote. That is, no one has ever found any evidence that Gandhi said it. Personally, I think it's a great line, but too modern -- too sound-bitey -- to have come from Gandhi (though he was certainly capable of wit, e.g. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/will/CPP/gandhi.html).
It's common for great lines to get falsely attributed to great persons: it increases their chance of being repeated. One might call them "cuckoo quotes" since, like eggs planted in other birds' nests, they are memes planted in other people's reputations.
Edit: I love the internet. It turns out the one-liner is a paraphrase of a speech made to a clothing workers' union (presumably not by Gandhi) in 1914:
First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
Google has a monopoly on search, but Microsoft has a couple at least as valuable as Google's.
Bing is the competition Google needs to light a fire under its ass and start making its algorithm good again.
Why?
What monopolies? Plenty of people use Firefox these days, some even use Chrome and Safari. Personally, I use Opera. Or perhaps you are talking about OS - well, OS X is nearing 10% market share, and (AFAIK) showing no signs of slowing down. The only real monopoly MSFT has is Office, and honestly, that's because it's far and away the best office suite. OOo is pretty good, but definitely inferior to Office.
If anyone has a monopoly on search, it's Google, to the point that "Google" has become a synonym for search. If you're really anti-monopoly rather than just anti-Microsoft, you should be rooting for Bing.
I'll not even get into their shenanigans with ODF and ISO but did you ever noticed that IE doesn't have a spellchecker. What a strange omission from a modern browser, unless of course you have a monopoly in the OS, the browser and Office software and can happily screw customers to maintain them.
Half of web 2.0 is built on a reverse engineered feature from IE that was only put in so that users of Exchange could have a superior "web" experience as long as they used IE and not an actual browser.
Uh, no, I'm pretty sure it's because creating an office suite is a hell of a lot of work, and because Office is really pretty good, and so it doesn't make business sense for anyone to compete right now. If Office were lacking, you'd see competition. As it is, I don't think the (near) monopoly on office suites is actually hurting anyone. It's not like Microsoft isn't innovating - I've been using Office 2010 builds for a month now and it's very solid, with tons of improvements over Office 2007.
Actually, Microsoft's Dryad project is significantly more sophisticated than Hadoop. Using Hadoop is not exactly a compelling example of how technically sophisticated your organization is or how much you utilize "the cloud", anyway.
However, if Bing gets to a point where their search results are clearly better, then Google will be in trouble, and no amount of screaming "we have a better infrastructure!" will help. Users want the best results, and that's why Google originally won against other search engines.
I don't know if that's ever going to happen. Probably not, but I would not bet on it.
Google provides me with a service. In that respect I don't care how that service is provided and on what technology that is based. It could be a giga-cluster of retrofitted Commodore 64s thrown out in orbit to save on real estate costs, kept in place by a reinforced fiber back down to Google HQ. As long as the service works, I wouldn't care less.
This gives google complete freedom in their implementation, so they pretty much built up their own infrastructure from scratch, for a very specific purpose.
Microsoft on the other side delivers software, general purpose platforms which you can deploy and build your own solutions on. Granted, they got the whole internet thing a little late, but I can't blame them for trying to exploit the technology they already posses instead of ditching it all and starting from scratch.
With Microsoft's solutions, I know I can make them do whatever I want, on pretty much any x86 hardware, and I know it will work. "Google OS", for a lack of better name, I doubt would be particularly useful for the general public.
I don't think it's surprising for a platform tailored for one specific goal to perform better than general purpose platforms in that specific area, but that hardly means that the other platform is worthless.
In this respect, it would seem that Google's "horizontal" infrastructure stack makes it more adept at handling web-scale problems across multiple domains (versus Microsoft's "vertical" problem-by-problem approach).
Some queries that would be relatively easy (and not super-scalable) have to be reformulated so computation is done on write and not on read. An example is writing an app that uses ranking and decay: http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/overheard.html
There's a different set of tricks to learn, so in the context of cloud computing, if you aren't willing to confine your approaches to those amenable to truly distributed cloud computing, you're not addressing the basic problems. Of course, there will be apps that can work effectively without web-scale, but are you talking about the "cloud" at that point or just hosted apps?