6 ms·

Does Microsoft actually have a vested interest specifically in the use of Java by Google, such as being upset that Google had free use of the Java APIs while it

Does Microsoft actually have a vested interest specifically in the use of Java by Google, such as being upset that Google had free use of the Java APIs while itself was scolded for implementing their own JVM? Or is it basically "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"?

OGinparadise 14y ago
Guessing only: MS is a software company so they'd want to make it harder for others to copy (like whatever Google supposedly copied from java.) This, of course, is business for all involved, nothing personal.
- stanleydrew 14y ago
  But that's a little strange, since Google is also a software company.
  - chii 14y ago
    Google is not a software company. Google is an advertising company that uses (massively intelligent) software.
    - cromwellian 14y ago
      This is a common refrain, sometimes used as a slight, as if Google is just another Don Draper firm, that just happens to have some tech in its portfolio. As a rank-and-file Googler, my personal experience is that most Google engineers perceive that we are a technology company and advertising is often off in the edges of their mind. Yes, advertising is the majority revenue product, but like many startups, the people working on moonshots are not thinking about the business model, they are thinking about the problem to be solved. When most people go work on a 20% project, some of which become top Google services, they don't start out thinking, for example, "How can I increase ad revenue by making voice recognition better."
      - OGinparadise 14y ago
        they don't start out thinking, for example, "How can I increase ad revenue by making voice recognition better." No offense, yet ad revenue magically it increase quarter after quarter after quarter. Surprise? FYI: You are an ad company, a cutthroat and an annoying one too (I am about to use adblock.) Yes, advertising is the majority revenue product Consider the "moonshots" as HR advertising and to get Google press. Virtually all your earnings are because you twist things to get people to click on those expensive and annoying ads and you also buy politicians. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Have you mined those asteroids yet? Sure got a lot of press out of it
        cromwellian 14y ago
        When you find a way to hire 10,000 top engineers and scientists and put them to work on exciting web services with a decent salary (deployed on the most scaleable and power efficient datacenters out there), much of which, the average person loves to use, but won't pay for, and without using tax dollars or scraping by on donations, let me know, I've love to do a start up with you. Did you pay for Netscape when they used to charge money? I assure you, revenue doesn't increase magically quarter by quarter, in case you haven't noticed, when Google started out, most of the population still wasn't online yet, and most advertising dollars were spent in print and video media. Most of the meteoric rise can be traced simply to growth in the online audience and a switch-over from print to digital, not somehow arm twisting someone to click on an ad, if anything, people are induced to click on ads by making them less annoying and more relevant, otherwise, they 'mentally adblock' them. You can believe what you want about motives, I only know what I experience everyday as far as others I know -- we like working on interesting or hard problems, just like any collection of geeky engineers and scientists. That I get paid to do what I'm passionate about, I personally feel grateful and lucky.
        taligent 14y ago
        So what you are saying is that Google is a talented and large advertising company.
        14y ago
    - stanleydrew 14y ago
      Would you call NBC an advertising company? Probably not. And yet their revenue comes almost entirely from ads as well.
      - pacaro 14y ago
        It depends on perspective. Are commercials annoying bits between the program segments you want to watch? Or are programs there to persuade you not to switch channels when the commercials come on? obviously the story is different on HBO, Showtime etc., and on BBC in the UK
    - gordaco 14y ago
      My two cents. I worked for a few months in a local social network, a fairly-sized one by the way (second-only to facebook in traffic in our country). The engineers thought about the company as technology-based, and our work certainly was to develop such technology; we were the bread and butter of the staff, which means that most of the company's workforce was devoted to create software. As for managers and such, they only talked about advertising whenever revenue was directly involved in the discussion, but usually that wasn't the case despite it being our basic source of money, since we were already an established company without funding problems. Most of the time they took the revenue for granted, and the guidelines they gave us were not about ad visibility and such, but about user experience, increasing the time they spent on our site, etc. So, basically, there was a big separation between what we did and where we got the money from. I think that a company is far better defined from the former than the latter, and I'm inclined to think that people in google think the same, even the non-technical staff.
      - chii 14y ago
        so your managers have figured out that the best way to sustain ad revenue is to make a product that people enjoy using. that's why the focus is poon user experience and not on add visibility. making ads more visible or numerous is a short term gain but a long term loss. Google is doing exactly the same.
  - OGinparadise 14y ago
    Google's bread and butter (Adwords, Search algorithms and related data) are not installed on 90% of the world's PCs, they're guarded as trade secrets. Android, Chrome and the rest only feed data and users to what is a secret. They're free and "open" to encourage adoption and by extension get more ads served, increase ad relevancy and as a bonus try to ruin Apple's and MSFT's business.
- azakai 14y ago
  > Guessing only: MS is a software company so they'd want to make it harder for others to copy (like whatever Google supposedly copied from java.) The guess can be a little more specific: Microsoft saw what the verdict said about Java and was concerned for what it meant for C#. Oracle having less control over Java because languages are not copyrightable means Microsoft has less control over C#. C# is important to Microsoft, so it's going to make an effort to maintain full control over it. Which would be bad for all of us should Oracle and Microsoft prevail. Java and C# are widely-used, and the kind of control Oracle and Microsoft want over them is excessive.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - kvb 14y ago
    Actually, I think that there are both benefits and costs to tightly controlled languages, and it's not clear at all that the costs outweigh the benefits. Indeed, arguably C#'s great progress in the last decade compared to Java is due in large part to Microsoft's hegemony as opposed to Java's community process. Regardless, as I understand it (though IANAL) Oracle's copyright argument was over Android's reuse of Java's APIs (including signatures and documentation), not over the Java language itself. Basically they claimed that just like a cookbook is subject to copyright even though an individual recipe may not be, so should the collected Java API be even though individual method signatures wouldn't be.
    - nitrogen 14y ago
      My response to the cookbook analogy would be that Oracle shouldn't be granted a copyright on the API because that gives them effective ownership over the code everyone else writes to interface with that API.
  - xentronium 14y ago
    > The guess can be a little more specific: Microsoft saw what the verdict said about Java and was concerned for what it meant for C#. Oracle having less control over Java because languages are not copyrightable means Microsoft has less control over C#. > C# is important to Microsoft, so it's going to make an effort to maintain full control over it. C# is ECMA standard.
zmmmmm 14y ago
Microsoft's interest lately is to conduct a kind psyops campaign against Google. They seem to have identified that a huge problem for them is that people really like Google a lot. So basically their strategy is to throw mud at Google until people don't trust them or like them any more. So I would say this fits into their campaign very neatly - if they can portray Google as stealing technology from other companies then they can keep piecing together this picture of "bad Google" that they want everyone to see.
- kvb 14y ago
  I doubt that their amicus briefs are driven by PR considerations as opposed to actual business concerns. How does a court filing that most of the public will never see help them shift public perceptions of Google?
  - zmmmmm 14y ago
    Obviously the public are not going to read the court filing, the judges will. And if the court accepts an appeal there will be years of bad PR for Google as the world discusses how and whether Google "stole" the APIs for Android. Even if Google is cleared there will still be smear on their name from people perceiving that they are profiting from something they didn't really make themselves.
- rza 14y ago
  If this is their plan, I think it's a terrible one. All they're really doing is reinforcing their image as a patent troll. This will only strengthen Google's position as the "good guy" as it is very easy to simply see this case as freedom and innovation vs. corporate greed.
lucian1900 14y ago
They likely want APIs to be copywritable.

OGinparadise 14y ago

Guessing only: MS is a software company so they'd want to make it harder for others to copy (like whatever Google supposedly copied from java.) This, of course, is business for all involved, nothing personal.

stanleydrew 14y ago
But that's a little strange, since Google is also a software company.
- chii 14y ago
  Google is not a software company. Google is an advertising company that uses (massively intelligent) software.
  - cromwellian 14y ago
    This is a common refrain, sometimes used as a slight, as if Google is just another Don Draper firm, that just happens to have some tech in its portfolio. As a rank-and-file Googler, my personal experience is that most Google engineers perceive that we are a technology company and advertising is often off in the edges of their mind. Yes, advertising is the majority revenue product, but like many startups, the people working on moonshots are not thinking about the business model, they are thinking about the problem to be solved. When most people go work on a 20% project, some of which become top Google services, they don't start out thinking, for example, "How can I increase ad revenue by making voice recognition better."
    - OGinparadise 14y ago
      they don't start out thinking, for example, "How can I increase ad revenue by making voice recognition better." No offense, yet ad revenue magically it increase quarter after quarter after quarter. Surprise? FYI: You are an ad company, a cutthroat and an annoying one too (I am about to use adblock.) Yes, advertising is the majority revenue product Consider the "moonshots" as HR advertising and to get Google press. Virtually all your earnings are because you twist things to get people to click on those expensive and annoying ads and you also buy politicians. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Have you mined those asteroids yet? Sure got a lot of press out of it
      - cromwellian 14y ago
        When you find a way to hire 10,000 top engineers and scientists and put them to work on exciting web services with a decent salary (deployed on the most scaleable and power efficient datacenters out there), much of which, the average person loves to use, but won't pay for, and without using tax dollars or scraping by on donations, let me know, I've love to do a start up with you. Did you pay for Netscape when they used to charge money? I assure you, revenue doesn't increase magically quarter by quarter, in case you haven't noticed, when Google started out, most of the population still wasn't online yet, and most advertising dollars were spent in print and video media. Most of the meteoric rise can be traced simply to growth in the online audience and a switch-over from print to digital, not somehow arm twisting someone to click on an ad, if anything, people are induced to click on ads by making them less annoying and more relevant, otherwise, they 'mentally adblock' them. You can believe what you want about motives, I only know what I experience everyday as far as others I know -- we like working on interesting or hard problems, just like any collection of geeky engineers and scientists. That I get paid to do what I'm passionate about, I personally feel grateful and lucky.
        taligent 14y ago
        So what you are saying is that Google is a talented and large advertising company.
        14y ago
  - stanleydrew 14y ago
    Would you call NBC an advertising company? Probably not. And yet their revenue comes almost entirely from ads as well.
    - pacaro 14y ago
      It depends on perspective. Are commercials annoying bits between the program segments you want to watch? Or are programs there to persuade you not to switch channels when the commercials come on? obviously the story is different on HBO, Showtime etc., and on BBC in the UK
  - gordaco 14y ago
    My two cents. I worked for a few months in a local social network, a fairly-sized one by the way (second-only to facebook in traffic in our country). The engineers thought about the company as technology-based, and our work certainly was to develop such technology; we were the bread and butter of the staff, which means that most of the company's workforce was devoted to create software. As for managers and such, they only talked about advertising whenever revenue was directly involved in the discussion, but usually that wasn't the case despite it being our basic source of money, since we were already an established company without funding problems. Most of the time they took the revenue for granted, and the guidelines they gave us were not about ad visibility and such, but about user experience, increasing the time they spent on our site, etc. So, basically, there was a big separation between what we did and where we got the money from. I think that a company is far better defined from the former than the latter, and I'm inclined to think that people in google think the same, even the non-technical staff.
    - chii 14y ago
      so your managers have figured out that the best way to sustain ad revenue is to make a product that people enjoy using. that's why the focus is poon user experience and not on add visibility. making ads more visible or numerous is a short term gain but a long term loss. Google is doing exactly the same.
- OGinparadise 14y ago
  Google's bread and butter (Adwords, Search algorithms and related data) are not installed on 90% of the world's PCs, they're guarded as trade secrets. Android, Chrome and the rest only feed data and users to what is a secret. They're free and "open" to encourage adoption and by extension get more ads served, increase ad relevancy and as a bonus try to ruin Apple's and MSFT's business.
azakai 14y ago
> Guessing only: MS is a software company so they'd want to make it harder for others to copy (like whatever Google supposedly copied from java.) The guess can be a little more specific: Microsoft saw what the verdict said about Java and was concerned for what it meant for C#. Oracle having less control over Java because languages are not copyrightable means Microsoft has less control over C#. C# is important to Microsoft, so it's going to make an effort to maintain full control over it. Which would be bad for all of us should Oracle and Microsoft prevail. Java and C# are widely-used, and the kind of control Oracle and Microsoft want over them is excessive.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- kvb 14y ago
  Actually, I think that there are both benefits and costs to tightly controlled languages, and it's not clear at all that the costs outweigh the benefits. Indeed, arguably C#'s great progress in the last decade compared to Java is due in large part to Microsoft's hegemony as opposed to Java's community process. Regardless, as I understand it (though IANAL) Oracle's copyright argument was over Android's reuse of Java's APIs (including signatures and documentation), not over the Java language itself. Basically they claimed that just like a cookbook is subject to copyright even though an individual recipe may not be, so should the collected Java API be even though individual method signatures wouldn't be.
  - nitrogen 14y ago
    My response to the cookbook analogy would be that Oracle shouldn't be granted a copyright on the API because that gives them effective ownership over the code everyone else writes to interface with that API.
- xentronium 14y ago
  > The guess can be a little more specific: Microsoft saw what the verdict said about Java and was concerned for what it meant for C#. Oracle having less control over Java because languages are not copyrightable means Microsoft has less control over C#. > C# is important to Microsoft, so it's going to make an effort to maintain full control over it. C# is ECMA standard.

zmmmmm 14y ago

Microsoft's interest lately is to conduct a kind psyops campaign against Google. They seem to have identified that a huge problem for them is that people really like Google a lot. So basically their strategy is to throw mud at Google until people don't trust them or like them any more. So I would say this fits into their campaign very neatly - if they can portray Google as stealing technology from other companies then they can keep piecing together this picture of "bad Google" that they want everyone to see.

kvb 14y ago
I doubt that their amicus briefs are driven by PR considerations as opposed to actual business concerns. How does a court filing that most of the public will never see help them shift public perceptions of Google?
- zmmmmm 14y ago
  Obviously the public are not going to read the court filing, the judges will. And if the court accepts an appeal there will be years of bad PR for Google as the world discusses how and whether Google "stole" the APIs for Android. Even if Google is cleared there will still be smear on their name from people perceiving that they are profiting from something they didn't really make themselves.
rza 14y ago
If this is their plan, I think it's a terrible one. All they're really doing is reinforcing their image as a patent troll. This will only strengthen Google's position as the "good guy" as it is very easy to simply see this case as freedom and innovation vs. corporate greed.

lucian1900 14y ago

They likely want APIs to be copywritable.