Microsoft Is the New Google, Google Is the Old Microsoft
forbes.com
forbes.com
> Just as the evolution of Windows got sluggish once Microsoft had domination of the computer space, so Google looks to be resting on its laurels in mobile with Android. I’m a huge fan of Android 5.0 Lollipop but in hindsight was prioritising ‘Material Design’ (illustrated above) over combating performance, battery life and fragmentation issues really a wise move? After all Android’s native UI is the first thing most handset makers throw out the window.
What? Project Volta focused on Battery Life. They changed the entire runtime to ART for performance. Material design was a much needed solution to coherent UI across Google's properties.
Also remember that Google brought us HTTP/2 when Microsoft and Apple were completely ignoring the web.
GMail is great but they are still bringing Inbox which I find to be a good step towards better Email management. I understand it might now work well for everyone but still, they are trying to evolve it.
And they are focusing on moonshot projects while continuing to improve existing successful products in a meaningful way for exactly the same reason - not to be complacent. How otherwise do you not rest on your laurels?
The article is a bunch of baloney really.
Besides this article isn't about execution quality - it is about where Google's alleged lack of focus is - it said Lollipop was all about Material design focus where as in reality feature focus wise it was a well balanced release.
This reminds me so much to Windows 95 ...
That statement is so wrong... I switched to linux from Win95 because the bluescreens sucked so bad. No comparison really.
Is this kind of a glass half empty thing? The dramatically more popular Galaxy S5 saw a significantly improved battery life. If we just include those data points, and average across users of Android, it was a huge net win for users.
This article is clickbait garbage (again a "contributor"), and it allows people to ply their grievances as if they are canonical.
According to Google. According to independent benchmarks, battery life got worse on a whole slew of devices.
> They changed the entire runtime to ART for performance
But did it actually get faster? Not by much.
> Material design was a much needed solution to coherent UI across Google's properties
Are the UIs coherent across Google's properties? Half a year on the answer is still no: Implementation is spotty across the first-party apps, many of which directly violate the guidelines given to developers.
It's a new runtime, and expected to get better and faster. If you don't like it that much, and you sound like you really HATE Android, maybe you should use something else. You'll feel better.
MS Research has been doing this kind of thing for years. Most of the projects never go anywhere. Google isn't the first company to do R&D - they're just really public about it to try and improve their public image.
Just in case you needed some backup for this point:
Google X started sometime in 2009-2010. In the time its been around only one project - the project around "Engineered Architecture" was successful and the team was able to form a company called Flux (https://www.flux.io).
Funny, they're being sued now by the architect they brought in with the idea for the program:
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3039930/fast-feed/architect-sues...
Microsoft became complacent with WinMO, even few office releases were meh. Windows stagnated until security blunders forced them to react. Google on the other hand isn't being complacent with GMail (Inbox), Android (Lollipop), Chrome (v41) or Search (Google Now).
Glass flopped. Self-driving cars haven't been released and there are plenty of people working on that (Google just makes a big PR thing out of it) and Google Now is great (although hardly one of their moonshots?).
>> "Google on the other hand isn't being complacent with GMail (Inbox), Android (Lollipop), Chrome (v41) or Search (Google Now)."
Inbox is certainly interesting but most people I know don't like it. I did like it but moved away due to rising features. Lollipop killed my battery life and slowed my device to a crawl. Chrome has become sluggish and bloated. Like I said Google Now is great but only if I give Google all my data and give up all my privacy (search history, location history).
Daniel Eran Dilger, the apple fanboy had a brilliant observation on John Sculley's Apple:
"In general, Sculley's Apple consistently produced ambitious but unrealistic technology plans that attempted to over-achieve at a price that failed to capture a sustainable segment of the market. " (http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/7C942A13-E006-4EBB-A4...)
Yes, I think Larry Page is another John Sculley.
Edit:
Actually I think GoogleX projects are fine, b/c they are in fact PR projects: couple of billions here and there to maintain a hi-tech myth. Money well spent!
The problem is the products like realtime search, Buzz and G+. They are ill designed, poor planed, poor executed and have 0 substance.
Two much collaboration with serious companies for that to be true. Unless you're saying everybody invests time and money in such PR efforts.
Given how profound you seem to think most everything of Google sucks (seen in a multitude of posts of yours throughout this thread), I'm curious what device you have that Lollipop "killed"? I'm going to call bullshit
HN has seen a HUGE influx of Microsoft shills, and it's getting disconcerting.
And an almost immediate karma punishing (-11 in less than a minute), despite this story sitting on the second page. Does Microsoft give an extra bonus if you sign up for HN? The astroturfing PR efforts have gotten quite a bit more pronounced. It feels like the glorious Slashdot days of old.
This post and a large percentage of the comments, and the moderation, is essentially a "shit on Google" post, somehow trying to make Microsoft look better in some relative sense. It is terrible fanboy noise.
And the gent I responded to just picked up someone else's grievances. I would wager good money they have no Android device "ruined" by Lollipop. They just want to legitimize their walls of anti-Google screeds.
EDIT: I've really riled up some astorturfers. Any post I make is almost immediately attacked.
On the other hand, most of Google's projects don't have much of a business value risk. If they'll work well, most likely they'll make good deal of money(unless the competition wins - but i believe Google also thinks hard on making projects hard to copy , or some other substitute challenges the market - but hey what can you do?)
You only have that half-right, Microsoft hasn't been ignoring the web for several years, but Apple still is. The problem for Microsoft is that it can't move the web anymore. The center of gravity is in mobile and they don't have any market share there. Apple doesn't want to move the web, their walled garden is making much more money for them and there's no need for competition.
Developing a real app with JS, where you have rewrite everything that's already in UIKit, Foundation, etc from the ground up, sucks ass. Your app is automatically slower, less APIs to work with, and is extremely limited in technologies. It can't do layout or many features better than the frameworks that countless engineers at Apple built and work on.
It's waaay less about walled garden and more about quality and the philosophy of the web. Is the web supposed to be what many of us want it to be? I love that browsers are being beefed up, but it increases the attack surface for hackers, increases more points of failure in your application because of some weird quirk by one vendor, there will be 20 people with 20 different frameworks and 20 different ways on how to do an app the right way, and most important, newbies will become extremely overwhelmed by the noise and lack of direction in on the platform.
If the web was a better platform, apps would not be so successful. But it's not (for now), it sucks so horribly and keeps me frustrated. We need more companies like Facebook (React) and Google (less so because of their scatter brain strategy: Angular, Web Components, Polymer, whatever Gmail and Youtube are built on) that shape the web
That's a terrible example since both companies contributed to the standard.
>The httpbis working group considered Google's SPDY protocol, Microsoft's HTTP Speed+Mobility proposal (SPDY based),[5] and Network-Friendly HTTP Upgrade.[11] In July 2012 Facebook provided feedback on each of the proposals and recommended HTTP/2 be based on SPDY.[12] The initial draft of HTTP/2 was published in November 2012 and is based on a straight copy of SPDY.[13]
About the only thing I've seen that is remotely interesting is supporting docker in Azure.
Maybe none of those are things you'd use, but to other people they're a pretty big deal.
The other thing the store brings is a centralized source for reputable software downloads. The malware-infested download.com and its ilk are a huge issue for your average Windows user. Putting downloads in one place, making them sortable by popularity and ratings, and making it easy to pay for things would make a huge difference for the user experience. There was a bit of an uproar when Apple did it in OS X, but now it's an expected feature.
It's funny how Windows used to be the OS that had all the 3rd party software written for it. Now for any given task OS X tends to have one or two really great options, and Windows tends to have a pile of 50 abandoned weekend projects and open source UI trainwrecks but nothing you'd actually enjoy using.
Well, then again: http://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/11/22/what-it-takes-to-run-s...
Why would stack overflow focus on MS when MS has their own forums and developer resources? I have to admit, I don't look for MS things on stack, but everything else I have questions about I'll look there. In fact, most searches for MS related questions are found on sites other than stack.
IOW, WTF ???
I think there might also be a codinghorror blog post that details why they picked .net, but I'm having a hard time finding it.
No problem, it's wrong that your comment was downvoted. Even with my upvote it's still grey.
I have a work Google apps account and a vanilla Gmail account and it is frusturating not having a unified inbox. And I keep getting "Network errors" with it (on two devices that I tried).
I recently dumped the GMail app for Outlook on iOS and it has just been phenomenal. I wish the search was a little better and I could see my GMail labels, but for now, it looks like I won't be going back.
How does that work if you're using Windows phone?
"Microsoft has been forced to get it, their stuff works great on all platforms"
I can't get IE, VS, or much else from MS to work on linux. Until then, MS isn't really working on all platforms.
If you use one email address sole for transactions, and one for personal emails, Inbox is actually pretty awesome. I don't know many people who do this though.
Before Windows 8 we just had years and years of incremental "sameness." Vista was meant to be a big shake-up but instead that got shelved and we got a very modest improvement over XP (driver issues and memory consumption not withstanding), the same with 7, it was a very incremental improvement over Vista (even if coming from XP directly made it look bigger).
Windows 8 was where the company decided to really try something new. It was the largest UI shakeup since Windows 95/NT 4.0. And I think that shakeup helped shake some cobwebs loose because since then Microsoft are continuing to take bigger (welcome) risks.
Even just looking at the Windows 10 technical preview feedback program should tell you this is a new Microsoft. In previous Windows pre-releases, they would fix bugs in alpha/beta releases, but never made UI or functionality changes just based on feedback. They ARE with Windows 10.
If you go look at the feedback Windows 10 has received, several major pieces have been actioned.
Seems like the company has a fire lit under it again. It is welcome.
Just take a look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Wind...
I agree that Windows 8 was bold, but it was still a mis-step in that it assumed a touch screen. Using a mouse with that UI was an exercise in frustration.
But windows 8 was SOOOOO bad, and destroyed any credibility MS has to make any competent usability decision and showed a complete lack of understanding of the user...
Do they have any choice but to do UI changes in-beta for Win10?
That's your answer. Users hate drastic UI changes, especially ones that optimized for a specific experience (touchscreen) different from what they're using it for.
W8 is a beast of a performer, but the Metro UI killed it for many users.
Long story short: I bought a MacBook. I would never have considered using an Apple product if Windows 8 hadn't been so frustrating to try to use.
Yes, I could have learned to use Windows 8. But if I am going to learn something new, I'm going to try to select smartly from all the systems available, and Windows is only a small part of that. In other words, Windows 8 forced me to make a decision that I wouldn't have even made if those computers had Windows 7 on them. If they had Windows 7, I would have just bought one and got to work.
I suppose I can thank MS for my newfound love of Linux. If they hadn't forced me to learn something new, I might have stuck with what I knew: Windows.
The user experience of 8 is hated by long-term Windows users. Microsoft have never been a consumer software company, their customers were OEMs and corporations. They shouldn't be giving away Windows 10 for free, they should give Windows 8 users a refund.
Desperation doesn't make a company inspiring or trustworthy.
Personally, I like Windows 8. I don't use the Metro apps (or whatever they are called now) but it's basically Windows with a lot of incremental improvements. It seems like most people complain about the new Start Screen replacing the Start Menu. I've long used the Windows button as search rather than as a drawer for apps that I wade through* so the Start Screen is just a bit nicer looking with no functional difference from Windows 7.
* If you aren't doing this you need to try it. Hit the Windows key, type what you want, hit Enter. It's a huge improvement over hunting through the Start Menu.
Well, they made it more touch friendly, so they were obviously copying Apple... /s
I guess you've forgotten that people lined up to purchase Windows 95 the way that people used to line up to by the early iPhones.
Microsoft has always been a consumer company; they just haven't always been good at it.
I get some of the criticism he has for Google when it comes to their OS strategy and Google+. But on the other hand, Google is making real progress in some of the core AI areas, and they are applying it so well to the tons of data they have.
I've been travelling a lot recently, and I found that Google Maps is towering head and shoulders above its competitors. Not only does it have a lot more high quality information (about public transport for instance), it is also much better at guessing what I mean when I search for something, which is even more important when you're not sitting behind your desk.
Google Maps feels like it is getting fanatical attention from the people behind it. They don't seem to be distracted by any moonshots at all. And if anything, the driverless car has to be an additional boost to their motivation. I feel that all kinds of projects that apply AI to tons of data are converging really really well at Google right now.
The secret monopoly is that they use humans as adjuncts in rating websites, not just algos. I saw this on a Quora Q&A one time. Such human input would be most efficient as a non-duplicated effort: a monopoly. I would be interested to hear if I am wrong about this information.
And that's not to say I've tried. I had a blackberry, used Fastmail.fm, switched to Firefox. Just none of them really hold up against Google's products. They all work, just nowhere near as well as they should.
If there were alternatives I could switch to, I would. Especially their cloud services, but I'm not the one controlling the purse strings on that.
They might not cover all of your personal needs but for most people:
- iOS is as good as or better than Android
- Office is better than Google Docs
- Gmail is still the best web mail but Google mobile/desktop clients are no where near as good as the alternatives
- I find Safari 8 (on Mac) much faster, more efficient, and pleasant to use than Chrome. Firefox is close to Chrome but there are still a few (little) things with it that annoy me.
Memory usuage is also less and I don't get a bunch of non responding Chrome Worker processes.
At the risk of sounding like the old dude in the room (only 34 lol) ... I'd almost swear that I've read a variation of this exact sentence 15 years ago on places like slashdot. Just replace Google with Microsoft ... all their products "just worked", just, nowhere near as they could ;)
I moved to duckduckgo for searches, and let me tell you I'm not going back soon.
I think google's search engine is overrated.
Unless ofcourse, there is a Chrome only website.
A lot of the products Google has released were either terrible, stupid, or makes you go "WTF?". Google Glass was so worthless that I often wondered why they even bothered. I think Hololens will move the market regardless of its success. It might take MS one or two iterations to get it right, but if MS is willing to become bellicose on its strategy, people will take risks and develop. If Google had pushed out Fiber to more cities in a shorter period of time, I think Google could easily expand its product line beyond search and ads.
My fiancee's taking a land-development course, detailing all of the things you have to go through to bring water, electricity, sewage, Internet to a new area, all the utilities we take for granted. The professor is a guy who spent pretty much his entire career, 16 years, doing one deal (from which he personally netted tens of millions in profit). That should give you an idea of the timescale that public utilities operate on.
No, MS has realised Linux is winning in the Cloud and want to open source their development platform in a desperate attempt to stay relevant.
That said, Google strong-arming phone and tablet manufacturers, and indie musicians on YouTube is pretty shady too.
Google has a lot of development tools open sourced, almost no products. Android is one for a change, but with Google Play Services, most of what you really use is closed source.
Microsoft has tons of source code out there too, but no windows, no office... For VS I think it's a matter of time. But the point is: should they? What is the advantage?
Apple seems to be doing fine with developers, and how much of it is open source? In fact people like to pay more for apple hardware in order to talk about how free things should be.
Here, Microsoft will still make plenty of money; businesses would still want support contracts, after all, so Windows could be monetized like RHEL with Microsoft selling support contracts to medium and large enterprises. Selling Windows itself has been an obsolete business model for quite some time, and I have a good feeling that Microsoft is now starting to realize that.
Or, completely the norm in Ruby, Python, Java... um, every other language.
Did they OSS the IDE?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#Sun.27s_promise_and_ini...
That doesn't mean Microsoft isn't doing well. Their recent announcements and PR has been great (something they've always been good at). Microsoft just still has a big hill to climb
On the other hand, Google is becoming more and more like Microsoft.
And yes we did get an audit and had to fork out a couple of average developers' salaries but to be honest we're fucking rolling in cash thanks to them, so meh. Time to market is stupid low - we can have stuff up on Azure and making cash before the Java guys have started Eclipse and the python guys have provisioned their virtual envs and written their first wsgi handler.
(for ref, we do run some Linux kit on Azure but it's memcached and ops stuff)
Plus we were on AWS before and that went down. We had our own racks in a DC on Linux+Java before and that went down.
Shit happens. Architectural decisions are the way around it.
Bar one unusually large fuck up, most of the whinging about Azure comes from not RTFM and assuming it's a magic unicorn poo launcher and not a bunch of servers in a building somewhere with a light abstraction over the top.
That's the cloud, you will have downtime anywhere.
While Google has tried to push the rest of the industry to its way of thinking, it doesn't always succeed, whereas MS in its heyday was quite capable of strong-arming the rest of the industry, time and time again. Google has generally pushed and supported an open source approach which MS is finally beginning to move towards. Quite a change for MS, nothing new for Google.
Kelly's article uses some poor examples and paints a glowing picture of MS. I think he's correct in that there's been a shift in MS getting a lot more positive press, but I don't think he's correct at all about how poorly run Google has become.
I realize this is short on specifics, but I don't want to make this too long. I'll agree with the critics of Android that there are problems, but in my view, Android has always been rough on the edges and is finally getting better overall. Especially compared to the early years.
And sometimes a copy with some difference can be a lot better. Google+ hasn't taken off, but it wasn't ridiculous to think that grouping your contacts in circles for separate discussions could have been a significant improvement in social networking, like grouping emails into conversations was for webmail.
Re Google Plus, however, circles don't actually do that (ie they don't work like Facebook groups). People have no idea which circle you have put them in.
Circles are also incredibly slow and clunky to the point where they become unusable for more than small numbers of followers.
It's not ridiculous to think that someone could do a better social network than Facebook, just as Facebook did a better social network than Friendster, Google Orkut and others that were around at the time.
You could say the same about Google Search, of course, or eBay, or Amazon. However, it's tough taking on properties with more than a billion users.
One of their big strategic errors of the past few years is to try to be more like Apple when it does not fit their corporate culture or product set, which is the opposite of Microsoft's mistake. Not only that, but Google has pushed hard in social, and not halfheartedly either--in fact, they've pissed off their employees by pushing too hard on Plus. Lastly, Google is pushing hard in artificial intelligence, making big leaps. Their moonshot projects aren't totally stupid and dead. Maps' StreetView started as something similar.
Yes, there are some minor things that other new frameworks do better, but this is normal, any framework needs time to adapt. But in general, there is not a single thing that .NET is not attacking in all the current trends of development.
In fact, a lot of things are being based on .NET, including javascript 7 features like async functions and Netflix's RxJava that is a port of .NET Rx.
I'm not saying it's the absolute best framework out there, but it is pretty good. Saying Microsoft is doing nothing in this area is just crazy.
Is dotNET better than the collective JVM language ecosystem from a feature standpoint? Probably not. Sure you want to limit the debate to Java, which is basically a legacy language.
The JVM software ecosystem is still much better than dotNET, which took forever to get Hibernate and other framework ports over to it, and the typical developer still takes all microsoft-dictated "best practices" as canon from the holy see.
So sure, it's better than C++.
Not anymore. It's open source now, and that's the point the OP was making.
edit: Wait, downvoted? Am I wrong? I'd love to know if I have a misunderstanding of the situation. I thought MS opensourced .net and CLR and everything.
Second because what is being open sourced is not "the rest of the framework", but what is needed to build a new framework today, without the dependencies and problems from yesterday. The team announced that in time, even wpf and other windows stuff would be built on top of the new corefx as additional libraries.
The new corefx is not an asp.net only thing. It's just that asp.net is the most demanded and also the least dependent part of the framework to start this change.
There is still a lot of things to be done in order to achieve that, but I'm pretty sure it will happen because once things like collections and linq start evolving on corefx, they won't want to maintain two distinct frameworks.
Take a look at the most discussed topics on github, there is a lot of stuff being discussed there by the core team.
dotNET is a MS only platform.
And does Java support unsigned integers yet?
Also, about a year or so ago, they started porting to an LLVM-based solution and Unity 5+ is expected to be discontinue the Mono runtime.
.net core is now open source and can run on Linux/OS X. It can also use docker, that just made my skill set more appealing. These "marginal" improvements are actually huge steps for developers. For one, MS is leveraging what non-MS developers utilize. Doing so will make their product flexible and developers happy. WPF is getting a boost so that a single app can be written for multiple viewports in Windows 10. That'll simplify development.
They don't need people to build for their ecosystem anymore because they are making their ecosystem the same as everyone elses and beating them on quality.
The "average boring old cube farm" uses Java. Microsoft = Windows + Office.
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