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Hm, a lot of opinions here, ranging in insight. This one was the most perceptive, in my opinion: It’s not as if these companies are gearing up to produce autom

by andreyf 17y ago

Hm, a lot of opinions here, ranging in insight. This one was the most perceptive, in my opinion: It’s not as if these companies are gearing up to produce automobiles. The engineering teams for any of these products are, at most, 20 to 30 people — immaterial for Microsoft, which has 90,000 or so employees, and Google, which has 20,000. Nor are all of Google’s products even guaranteed to ship, being as they are in that semi-solid technical state called beta test and subject to cancellation on a whim.

TomOfTTB 17y ago
The problem with this statement is that Cringely has no way of knowing this and the facts publicly available contradict his account. Just to give one example look at Steve Ballmer and Bing. Unless he's flat out lying he's going to spend 5% to 10% of Microsoft's operating income on Bing (http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/171648.asp http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/171648.asp). That's not exactly immaterial as Cringely claims.
- aboodman 17y ago
  According to Ohloh, there are 199 committers to Chromium: http://www.ohloh.net/p/chrome/contributors?page=1 http://www.ohloh.net/p/chrome/contributors?page=1 A few of them probably don't work for Google, some are duplicates, but still nowhere near 20-30 people.
  - andreyf 17y ago
    Wow, that's an order of magnitude more than I expected... now I'm really curious how many full-time engineers Google pays to develop Chrome.
- blasdel 17y ago
  All of that spending thus far has been on marketing / advertising bullshit. They're probably blowing piles of money on datacenters too, but they'd be doing that anyway even if the Bing thing never happened. They see Google doing it and feel left out!
Elepsis 17y ago
This comment is wrong bordering on the obscene. Does he think Bing, which competes with Google feature-for-feature, can be built by 30 people, while Google itself needs most of its 20,000 employees to build its search engine? The same goes for the ChromeOS vs. Windows case. It's as though he thinks both Bing and ChromeOS are just toy products, mere demos designed to poke the competitors or rile up the press. They're not.

by andreyf 17y ago

TomOfTTB 17y ago

The problem with this statement is that Cringely has no way of knowing this and the facts publicly available contradict his account. Just to give one example look at Steve Ballmer and Bing. Unless he's flat out lying he's going to spend 5% to 10% of Microsoft's operating income on Bing (http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/171648.asp http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/171648.asp). That's not exactly immaterial as Cringely claims.

aboodman 17y ago
According to Ohloh, there are 199 committers to Chromium: http://www.ohloh.net/p/chrome/contributors?page=1 http://www.ohloh.net/p/chrome/contributors?page=1 A few of them probably don't work for Google, some are duplicates, but still nowhere near 20-30 people.
- andreyf 17y ago
  Wow, that's an order of magnitude more than I expected... now I'm really curious how many full-time engineers Google pays to develop Chrome.
blasdel 17y ago
All of that spending thus far has been on marketing / advertising bullshit. They're probably blowing piles of money on datacenters too, but they'd be doing that anyway even if the Bing thing never happened. They see Google doing it and feel left out!

Elepsis 17y ago

This comment is wrong bordering on the obscene. Does he think Bing, which competes with Google feature-for-feature, can be built by 30 people, while Google itself needs most of its 20,000 employees to build its search engine? The same goes for the ChromeOS vs. Windows case. It's as though he thinks both Bing and ChromeOS are just toy products, mere demos designed to poke the competitors or rile up the press. They're not.