4 ms·

Google's Microsoft Moment

79 points by blasdel 17y ago

stilist 17y ago
Interesting theory. There have certainly been occasional questions about exactly how trustworthy the company is, but no lasting negativity that I've seen. I suppose it has been long enough—and Google is big and broad enough—that a real backlash could begin to appear.
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  Agree. Extra points for the cartoon, which I hadn't seen before.
- inerte 17y ago
  One guess, a backslash might appear when people want to move data from Google to another company, pretty much like Office file formats.
iamelgringo 17y ago
I've had this nagging feeling/paranoia the past year, that I'm really not comfortable with the massive amounts of data that google obtains on me. If someone came along and gave me a better email experience with a calendaring system that I could pay for and be reasonably ensured that my payment was keeping my data private. Id jump off the Google platform relatively quickly.
- jsz0 17y ago
  Safe from what? Safe from misuse by Google? I think that's a risk you take with any third party provider. Being one of many millions of users does provide some security through obscurity in that respect. Chances are most of us are just not special enough to be legitimate targets. Safe from misuse by bad guys outside of Google via security problems? I'm pretty confident Google has some of the best engineers out there. You also have a strength in numbers thing going for you with Google. Lots of people are looking at it. Google is very high profile -- if they did have a leak you'd at least know about it. I can't say the same about some random provider. They could have half wit engineers who cover up data leaks. You might never know. Even bad providers can have sterling record if they choose not to report problems or simply have a run of good luck until someone copy & pastes the wrong command and every bit gets leaked. Safe from being an anonymous fraction of a statistic when Google aggregates its data? I'd be more worried about my ISP spying on me. Overall I think it's good to be aware of the risks but realistically there isn't a whole lot you can do about it no matter which provider you're using. If you were to separate all your different accounts to different providers you might at least spread the risk out. If you choose to run your own server(s) you quickly become the weakest link in the security chain. Even if you're a pro it probably won't be your full time job to administrate your servers so that already puts you at a disadvantage.
  - tome 17y ago
    What worries me about Google is not that it has my data, but that it has a massive cross section of my data: * search records * e-mail * calendaring * documents * which youtube videos I've watched etc. I'm sure it's much more than proportionally easier to abuse this information the wider the spread of it they have.
    - jodrellblank 17y ago
      You wish that's all they have on you - they also own doubleclick, and Google ads, two of the largest web advert providers in the world tracking you as you go to www.unrelated.example.org, and Google Analytics, one of the most popular web tracking extensions also tracking you as you go to www.anysite.example.org. Also any site that pulls graphs in from Google's public graphing API, or a sidebar from blogger or picasa. The bought DejaNews, so anything you post(ed) to Usenet is in their grasp, and they spider the entire web so if they can pull a probable forum name from your existing data then they can try linking them together. If you've ever used Google Maps to find directions, then the most likely place to find directions is from/to your home and from/to your workplace, so they can get highly probable locations for you. (Used it from an iPhone with GPS?). Shop with Google Checkout? Browse with Google Toolbar? Use any of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products ?
      - tome 17y ago
        Wow, very good examples! So what can be done to anonymise access to these services? Tor of course is one idea, or a different proxy server. Anything else, or other considerations?
      - dflock 17y ago
        Ok, serious question: what's the worst that could happen? Some internet entity (could be Google, could be someone else) knows everything about me - all my personal details, everything I've ever done on the internet that wasn't encrypted. What's the worst case scenario for me, realistically?
- sid 17y ago
  Hmmm, i sometimes get that same kind of feeling though i always tell myself, "no it should be ok", they are trusted, smart, respect my privacy my data and benevolant ... I store my emails using gmail, my code for my startup is backed up in my emails as a final restore point should something bad happen to my servers and source control, my design specs, tasks list are all stored within google document, my calculations and budgeting is done using googles spreadsheet. I still trust them and that is why i am still comfortable but to tell you the truth, the slightest glitch or security leak, or signs of evilism would really make me think twice. To add to this discussion a few things i have noticed (could be my paranoia, but who knows ..). A while back during uni there was this company called bullant (not sure if anyone ever heard of them). They had a decent product which consisted of a browser and a backend VM engine. There were a few features of the backend engine that i thought were really good and nice to develop in and generated really great apps that could be delivered over the internet. However i think the product didnt fly because it required users to change and use their own proprietry browser, the change was to drastic for users, it wasnt gradual enough as many users were already used to mozilla/netscape and ie. If i draw the comparisions sometimes i wonder if the introduction of chrome, the new V8 engine and all the hype of SaaS, whether this is a slow movement similar to what bullant all those years back tried to do. I wonder whether slowly and incrementally certain really great google apps will be just that tiny bit slower in ie or ff and slowly over time would certain features of the new great google app that everyone uses and loves stop working in those other browsers requiring us to all change to chrome to get the most out of it ? I sometims think whether the vision is that sometime in the future we all log into our linux/apple/windows computers and for 80% of the time fire up our chrome browsers go straight to our favourite google app saved in our favourites and no longer require 80% of the applications that we now have installed on our PC's ?
dustice 17y ago
I've seen many articles recently that suggest Microsoft's bundling of Browser to OS is analagous to Google's bundling of OS to Browser. They miss the key distiction that Google's offerings are /free/ and open-source. You don't like the OS? No problem, you can run Chrome (or Chromium) on whichever OS you want. No lock-ins, no harm to the user.
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  Assuming you were buying Windows because you wanted Windows for some unrelated reason, or buying a computer with Windows, then you also got IE, but you were free to run other browsers. How is it being closed source a meaningful distinction?
- trezor 17y ago
  Chrome != Chromium. Anyone who has tried Chromium in Linux will instantly notice they are using a much less polished product. Chromium may be open source, but Chrome is not.
  - ljlolel 17y ago
    If I may ask, how is it less polished? I'm posting with Chrome for Linux right now (and I used Chromium before, which is identical) and it looks beautiful. Excepting of course external plugin type issues (printing and Flash don't work yet), the browser runs super-fast, never crashes, and looks great. Some of the configuration options aren't complete, but those are minor issues (oh and I see they have added many of them).
    - trezor 17y ago
      It has gotten better recently, but it is lagging quite a lot compared to plain Chrome. Text rendering used to be horrible but it has gotten better. But if I can't even configure proxy settings without hacky gconf editing, that tells you that you are definitely using a browser in catch-up mode.
- fatdog789 17y ago
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
Am I wrong or is this just not true: "Google's recent development work on applications for mobile devices has often been delivered exclusively as applications for their own Android platform instead of as iPhone applications" I don't own an Android phone so maybe there's lots going on I'm not aware of but there seems to be plenty of stuff developed for a) any browser, b) any decent browser, c) iPhones specifically, d) java smartphones, e) Windows, f) Mac, g) Linux. He state's this is what Microsoft was like 5 or 10 years ago, and yet I think this is still true of Microsoft today. Certainly Microsoft sales folk I've recently come into contact with seem to be actively denying the existance of other browsers in relation to Sharepoint stuff.
- nostrademons 17y ago
  Yeah, I was gonna point that out. I've got some friends & family members with iPhones, and they use Maps & GMail all the time. I've met someone on the Mobile-Maps team, and he's always carrying around at least 3 different phones because he has to develop for them all. I work on the search UI, and a rough ordering of the amount of time I spend on each browser goes something like Firefox > IE7 > IE8 > IE6 > Chrome > Safari > Opera > Konqueror. The only browser that really gets screwed is Konqueror, and to a lesser extent Opera (sorry guys). There've been features that we launched for Firefox+IE but cut for Chrome due to time restrictions - yeah, it's embarrassing to not support our own browser, but it's less painful than cutting off 20% of the market.
rjurney 17y ago
The problem here is that in combination with Wave, Google is setting the platform that we are supposed to develop for a year or more before it exists. That IRRITATES the hell out of me. It is the same kind of egotistical douschebaggery Microsoft used to pull: pre-launching products to gain control before contributing anything. Watching the Wave introduction video... when I see that semi-euro, T-shirt wearing trim-bearded fuck up there on that stage with his falsely elegant peppy smart talk planning a 'boating trip', and the scripted passing back and forth with 'the best project manager in the world,' I see one thing and one thing only in my mind: Ballmer's sweaty bitch tits bouncing up and down, round and round, as he stomps and screams, vibrating to the tune of "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!" At least Ballmer had the good sense to be ugly, which gave him an odd kind of dignity. I think I prefer this stagecraft http://bit.ly/pwGXs http://bit.ly/pwGXs to this stagecraft http://bit.ly/15aSar http://bit.ly/15aSar because Google's culture of arrogance is starting to disgust me.
- freetard 17y ago
  > It is the same kind of egotistical douschebaggery Microsoft used to pull: pre-launching products to gain control before contributing anything. Well no, Google Wave will be open source and they already published the whole protocol and API so people can build clones of it before it's even released. Microsoft releases proprietary API ran on secret protocol no once can clone unless they get sued or do crazy reverse engineering in a country where they can't be sued. Not quite the same thing.
  - rjurney 17y ago
    Granted - FOSS is good. But the traffic will still be running through google for almost all of this. And that, combined with their sole invention of this... I don't like it. I'm tired of them. They are too big. The worship bothers me. They've turned a corner.
- bd 17y ago
  Well, the guy that probably orchestrated this Wave presentation came to Google from Microsoft (where he was "General Manager of Platform Evangelism"). http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/29/technology/msft_brain_drain.biz2/ http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/29/technology/msft_brain_drain....
tybris 17y ago
I thought we were past the short-sighted Microsoft is evil childishness. In general, if you think a large group of people is evil or stupid (especially if these people are known to be very, very smart), you are wrong and should be wondering why. If a company is growing its business is to be on the offense, challenging the competitors products. When it becomes too big to adapt to the changing needs of the customer quickly it needs to go on defense to protect its business. Has nothing to do with stupid or evil, just business.
- rdrimmie 17y ago
  The post isn't about evilness (and in fact Dash has frequently defended Microsoft, as he states). The post is about a corporate entity growing past the point where the internal concept of 'self' that its staff has differs largely from the external concept of its identity that the public has.

79 points by blasdel 17y ago

Interesting theory. There have certainly been occasional questions about exactly how trustworthy the company is, but no lasting negativity that I've seen. I suppose it has been long enough—and Google is big and broad enough—that a real backlash could begin to appear.

anigbrowl 17y ago
Agree. Extra points for the cartoon, which I hadn't seen before.
inerte 17y ago
One guess, a backslash might appear when people want to move data from Google to another company, pretty much like Office file formats.

iamelgringo 17y ago

I've had this nagging feeling/paranoia the past year, that I'm really not comfortable with the massive amounts of data that google obtains on me. If someone came along and gave me a better email experience with a calendaring system that I could pay for and be reasonably ensured that my payment was keeping my data private. Id jump off the Google platform relatively quickly.

jsz0 17y ago
Safe from what? Safe from misuse by Google? I think that's a risk you take with any third party provider. Being one of many millions of users does provide some security through obscurity in that respect. Chances are most of us are just not special enough to be legitimate targets. Safe from misuse by bad guys outside of Google via security problems? I'm pretty confident Google has some of the best engineers out there. You also have a strength in numbers thing going for you with Google. Lots of people are looking at it. Google is very high profile -- if they did have a leak you'd at least know about it. I can't say the same about some random provider. They could have half wit engineers who cover up data leaks. You might never know. Even bad providers can have sterling record if they choose not to report problems or simply have a run of good luck until someone copy & pastes the wrong command and every bit gets leaked. Safe from being an anonymous fraction of a statistic when Google aggregates its data? I'd be more worried about my ISP spying on me. Overall I think it's good to be aware of the risks but realistically there isn't a whole lot you can do about it no matter which provider you're using. If you were to separate all your different accounts to different providers you might at least spread the risk out. If you choose to run your own server(s) you quickly become the weakest link in the security chain. Even if you're a pro it probably won't be your full time job to administrate your servers so that already puts you at a disadvantage.
- tome 17y ago
  What worries me about Google is not that it has my data, but that it has a massive cross section of my data: * search records * e-mail * calendaring * documents * which youtube videos I've watched etc. I'm sure it's much more than proportionally easier to abuse this information the wider the spread of it they have.
  - jodrellblank 17y ago
    You wish that's all they have on you - they also own doubleclick, and Google ads, two of the largest web advert providers in the world tracking you as you go to www.unrelated.example.org, and Google Analytics, one of the most popular web tracking extensions also tracking you as you go to www.anysite.example.org. Also any site that pulls graphs in from Google's public graphing API, or a sidebar from blogger or picasa. The bought DejaNews, so anything you post(ed) to Usenet is in their grasp, and they spider the entire web so if they can pull a probable forum name from your existing data then they can try linking them together. If you've ever used Google Maps to find directions, then the most likely place to find directions is from/to your home and from/to your workplace, so they can get highly probable locations for you. (Used it from an iPhone with GPS?). Shop with Google Checkout? Browse with Google Toolbar? Use any of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products ?
    - tome 17y ago
      Wow, very good examples! So what can be done to anonymise access to these services? Tor of course is one idea, or a different proxy server. Anything else, or other considerations?
    - dflock 17y ago
      Ok, serious question: what's the worst that could happen? Some internet entity (could be Google, could be someone else) knows everything about me - all my personal details, everything I've ever done on the internet that wasn't encrypted. What's the worst case scenario for me, realistically?
sid 17y ago
Hmmm, i sometimes get that same kind of feeling though i always tell myself, "no it should be ok", they are trusted, smart, respect my privacy my data and benevolant ... I store my emails using gmail, my code for my startup is backed up in my emails as a final restore point should something bad happen to my servers and source control, my design specs, tasks list are all stored within google document, my calculations and budgeting is done using googles spreadsheet. I still trust them and that is why i am still comfortable but to tell you the truth, the slightest glitch or security leak, or signs of evilism would really make me think twice. To add to this discussion a few things i have noticed (could be my paranoia, but who knows ..). A while back during uni there was this company called bullant (not sure if anyone ever heard of them). They had a decent product which consisted of a browser and a backend VM engine. There were a few features of the backend engine that i thought were really good and nice to develop in and generated really great apps that could be delivered over the internet. However i think the product didnt fly because it required users to change and use their own proprietry browser, the change was to drastic for users, it wasnt gradual enough as many users were already used to mozilla/netscape and ie. If i draw the comparisions sometimes i wonder if the introduction of chrome, the new V8 engine and all the hype of SaaS, whether this is a slow movement similar to what bullant all those years back tried to do. I wonder whether slowly and incrementally certain really great google apps will be just that tiny bit slower in ie or ff and slowly over time would certain features of the new great google app that everyone uses and loves stop working in those other browsers requiring us to all change to chrome to get the most out of it ? I sometims think whether the vision is that sometime in the future we all log into our linux/apple/windows computers and for 80% of the time fire up our chrome browsers go straight to our favourite google app saved in our favourites and no longer require 80% of the applications that we now have installed on our PC's ?

dustice 17y ago

I've seen many articles recently that suggest Microsoft's bundling of Browser to OS is analagous to Google's bundling of OS to Browser. They miss the key distiction that Google's offerings are /free/ and open-source. You don't like the OS? No problem, you can run Chrome (or Chromium) on whichever OS you want. No lock-ins, no harm to the user.

jodrellblank 17y ago
Assuming you were buying Windows because you wanted Windows for some unrelated reason, or buying a computer with Windows, then you also got IE, but you were free to run other browsers. How is it being closed source a meaningful distinction?
trezor 17y ago
Chrome != Chromium. Anyone who has tried Chromium in Linux will instantly notice they are using a much less polished product. Chromium may be open source, but Chrome is not.
- ljlolel 17y ago
  If I may ask, how is it less polished? I'm posting with Chrome for Linux right now (and I used Chromium before, which is identical) and it looks beautiful. Excepting of course external plugin type issues (printing and Flash don't work yet), the browser runs super-fast, never crashes, and looks great. Some of the configuration options aren't complete, but those are minor issues (oh and I see they have added many of them).
  - trezor 17y ago
    It has gotten better recently, but it is lagging quite a lot compared to plain Chrome. Text rendering used to be horrible but it has gotten better. But if I can't even configure proxy settings without hacky gconf editing, that tells you that you are definitely using a browser in catch-up mode.
fatdog789 17y ago

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

Am I wrong or is this just not true: "Google's recent development work on applications for mobile devices has often been delivered exclusively as applications for their own Android platform instead of as iPhone applications" I don't own an Android phone so maybe there's lots going on I'm not aware of but there seems to be plenty of stuff developed for a) any browser, b) any decent browser, c) iPhones specifically, d) java smartphones, e) Windows, f) Mac, g) Linux. He state's this is what Microsoft was like 5 or 10 years ago, and yet I think this is still true of Microsoft today. Certainly Microsoft sales folk I've recently come into contact with seem to be actively denying the existance of other browsers in relation to Sharepoint stuff.

nostrademons 17y ago
Yeah, I was gonna point that out. I've got some friends & family members with iPhones, and they use Maps & GMail all the time. I've met someone on the Mobile-Maps team, and he's always carrying around at least 3 different phones because he has to develop for them all. I work on the search UI, and a rough ordering of the amount of time I spend on each browser goes something like Firefox > IE7 > IE8 > IE6 > Chrome > Safari > Opera > Konqueror. The only browser that really gets screwed is Konqueror, and to a lesser extent Opera (sorry guys). There've been features that we launched for Firefox+IE but cut for Chrome due to time restrictions - yeah, it's embarrassing to not support our own browser, but it's less painful than cutting off 20% of the market.

rjurney 17y ago

The problem here is that in combination with Wave, Google is setting the platform that we are supposed to develop for a year or more before it exists. That IRRITATES the hell out of me. It is the same kind of egotistical douschebaggery Microsoft used to pull: pre-launching products to gain control before contributing anything. Watching the Wave introduction video... when I see that semi-euro, T-shirt wearing trim-bearded fuck up there on that stage with his falsely elegant peppy smart talk planning a 'boating trip', and the scripted passing back and forth with 'the best project manager in the world,' I see one thing and one thing only in my mind: Ballmer's sweaty bitch tits bouncing up and down, round and round, as he stomps and screams, vibrating to the tune of "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!" At least Ballmer had the good sense to be ugly, which gave him an odd kind of dignity. I think I prefer this stagecraft http://bit.ly/pwGXs http://bit.ly/pwGXs to this stagecraft http://bit.ly/15aSar http://bit.ly/15aSar because Google's culture of arrogance is starting to disgust me.

freetard 17y ago
> It is the same kind of egotistical douschebaggery Microsoft used to pull: pre-launching products to gain control before contributing anything. Well no, Google Wave will be open source and they already published the whole protocol and API so people can build clones of it before it's even released. Microsoft releases proprietary API ran on secret protocol no once can clone unless they get sued or do crazy reverse engineering in a country where they can't be sued. Not quite the same thing.
- rjurney 17y ago
  Granted - FOSS is good. But the traffic will still be running through google for almost all of this. And that, combined with their sole invention of this... I don't like it. I'm tired of them. They are too big. The worship bothers me. They've turned a corner.
bd 17y ago
Well, the guy that probably orchestrated this Wave presentation came to Google from Microsoft (where he was "General Manager of Platform Evangelism"). http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/29/technology/msft_brain_drain.biz2/ http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/29/technology/msft_brain_drain....

tybris 17y ago

I thought we were past the short-sighted Microsoft is evil childishness. In general, if you think a large group of people is evil or stupid (especially if these people are known to be very, very smart), you are wrong and should be wondering why. If a company is growing its business is to be on the offense, challenging the competitors products. When it becomes too big to adapt to the changing needs of the customer quickly it needs to go on defense to protect its business. Has nothing to do with stupid or evil, just business.

rdrimmie 17y ago
The post isn't about evilness (and in fact Dash has frequently defended Microsoft, as he states). The post is about a corporate entity growing past the point where the internal concept of 'self' that its staff has differs largely from the external concept of its identity that the public has.