11 ms·

Microsoft Is the New Google, Google Is the Old Microsoft

275 points by hashx 12y ago

crazychrome 12y ago
yes, Google is new ms. but ms could be either new Google or new Palm. I wish ms the best, since Apple is not fun anymore.
k-mcgrady 12y ago
Interesting take and I have to say I agree with it. Microsoft recent (1-2 years) moves have been pretty exciting and are coming to fruition. Google hasn't excited me in a while and the last few times they have the results have been less that stellar (Glass, Google Plus, Wear). It's great to see MS buy startups and keep them alive. Much more interesting to me than Google's purchase and kill strategy. e.g. MS bought Acompli, rebranded, and have a great mobile email solution. Google bought Sparrow (at the time the best mobile and desktop Gmail solution), killed it and didn't come out with anything better.
- cowardlydragon 12y ago
  Like buying nokia? About the only thing I've seen that is remotely interesting is supporting docker in Azure.
  - wlesieutre 12y ago
    Putting .NET Core on Github? Visual Studio free for small teams? Surface Pro? Office across all platforms, many of them completely free? Giving away Windows 10? Maybe none of those are things you'd use, but to other people they're a pretty big deal.
    - plnk22 12y ago
      The writing was on the wall for MS's dev platform since open source dominates startups and the cloud. Nobody builds the next facebook or twitter using MS tools and Windows. If anything the rise of open source and linux put MS in a position where open sourcing their tools was the only option left to them to stay relevant. Making a show of 'loving' Linux was done in an attempt to give themselves a chance of getting a slice of the huge cloud computing market for hosting Linux. Make no mistake, Linux has put MS in a very uncomfortable position.
      - pconner 12y ago
        Stack Overflow (and its offshoots) was (is?) very MS-centric, but it's clearly in the minority.
        aceperry 12y ago
        ??? 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.
        bramgg 12y ago
        pconner is talking about how Stack Overflow is hosted on Windows (and maybe uses other Microsoft products, I wouldn't know).
        aceperry 12y ago
        I had no idea that "MS-centric" meant your site is hosted on Windows. Thank you for clarifying that. IOW, WTF ???
        bramgg 12y ago
        > Thank you for clarifying that. No problem, it's wrong that your comment was downvoted. Even with my upvote it's still grey.
        pconner 12y ago
        http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflow-built-with/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflo... 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.
      - michael_h 12y ago
        > Nobody builds the next facebook or twitter using MS tools and Windows Well, then again: http://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/11/22/what-it-takes-to-run-stack-overflow/ http://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/11/22/what-it-takes-to-run-s...
- cloudwalking 12y ago
  Have you used Inbox?
  - k-mcgrady 12y ago
    Yes. I actually like it - but most people I've talked to don't want to manage email that way. I eventually switched away myself due to lack of support for other email providers & unified inbox.
    - themagician 12y ago
      Inbox is this really cool thing that doesn't work for anyone. It's awesome for categorizing transactional emails, but misses the mark for person-to-person communication. 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.
      - EugeneOZ 12y ago
        Don't talk for "anyone".
    - vowelless 12y ago
      It really baffles me how bad the GMail app on iOS is. I was hoping that Inbox would be a step up, but like you said, I don't want my email managed that way. 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.
      - Joeri 12y ago
        At least you have a gmail app. I'm on windows phone, aka the platform that google shuns completely and utterly (to the point of taking apps out of the market when they buy a company that has a windows phone app). I used to do everything in google's ecosystem because they were OS agnostic, but now they just want to lock me into android and chromebook. Thanks but no thanks. Microsoft has been forced to get it, their stuff works great on all platforms.
icehawk219 12y ago
In a way I'd argue that Google suffers from the same real underlying issue that started to cause Microsoft to fall: complacency. They see themselves as a king of the world that can't be beaten. And in a way they aren't strictly wrong right now. So many people will still jump up and defend and support everything Google for no reason other then "because Google!". But that's also starting to change. In my opinion the best thing that could happen to Google right now would be for them to take a market share hit.
- suvelx 12y ago
  While Google might be complacent. I don't know of a single Google product that I use that has a reasonable alternative. 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.
  - AngusMcQuarrie 12y ago
    This is the same thing people said about Microsoft products in the 90s. Some of them (Like office for example) still are in that position.
  - k-mcgrady 12y ago
    >> "I don't know of a single Google product that I use that has a reasonable alternative." 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.
    - wil421 12y ago
      I've resently made the switch back to Safari from Chrome and I can say that it seems faster and more responsive (which is why I went to chrome in the first place). Memory usuage is also less and I don't get a bunch of non responding Chrome Worker processes.
superbaconman 12y ago
I don't understand how Microsoft expects to keep developers working for their ecosystem when they're not building anything marginally better than their existing competition.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  Hololens? If they can pull it off that'll be a hugely important platform for developers. Businesses also still rely on Windows and will for a long time so there is plenty of financial reason for developers to remain part of that ecosystem.
  - vezycash 12y ago
    This would be the perfect tagline for Hololens: Hololens - carry a cinema sized tv anywhere you go.
- rockdoe 12y ago
  One thing they've gotten better at is exactly that: it's no longer "their" ecosystem. They're much more heavily into standard HTML5 now than Google, for example. 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.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    That's what they're trying to do in THEORY but let's be frank, Windows 8's app ecosystem has flopped even if they're using HTML5/CSS and other standards.
    - rockdoe 12y ago
      But webapps still work fine on Windows, and they'll work on iOS and Android, too.
    - im2w1l 12y ago
      Microsoft should buy or clone Ninite.
aikah 12y ago
No. Microsoft is still the old Microsoft.Opensourcing a few libraries here and there dont make Microsoft the champion of open source. Microsoft is still forcing people to buy Windows licenses over and over again which each PC,and businesses using MS products are still subject to license audits. On the other hand, Google is becoming more and more like Microsoft.
- ohitsdom 12y ago
  Honestly, did you just read the title? Open source was not even a major point in the author's argument.
- mohamedattahri 12y ago
  I think you're confusing open-source with free.
- cssmoo 12y ago
  Some of us are quite happy to pay for it. 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)
  - minthd 12y ago
    What tools are you using to gain such advantage?
    - cssmoo 12y ago
      Azure PaaS and VS. Azure allows us to sidestep a lot of iteration 0 and devops stuff and just hit the metal. VS is just pretty good at what it does.
      - 12y ago
jimrandomh 12y ago
What I found most interesting is how Google and Microsoft are in the process of swapping places with regards to open source: Microsoft is taking formerly-closed projects open (particularly their compiler and development tools), while Google is taking formerly-open projects closed (particularly Glass, which was a closed-source fork of Android).
- cowardlydragon 12y ago
  A free compiler and dev tools? Revolutionary. Or, completely the norm in Ruby, Python, Java... um, every other language. Did they OSS the IDE?
  - jdmichal 12y ago
    You mean the Java for which the reference VM (Hotspot) and compiler were not open-sourced until November 13, 2006 [1], roughly corresponding with the Java 6 release? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#Sun.27s_promise_and_initial_release http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#Sun.27s_promise_and_ini...
  - nvivo 12y ago
    The compilers for .net were always free and were in every installation of the framework since the first version on 2003. And there were open source IDEs for .NET since the beginning.
- plnk22 12y ago
  How much has MS truly open sourced? SQL Server? Windows? Visual Studio? MS Office? 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.
  - nvivo 12y ago
    How much has google really open sourced? Think about it. Search engine? Gmail? Ad engine? Maps? Drive? Youtube? Nothing! 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.
Someone1234 12y ago
Windows 8 was actually a very brave move by Microsoft, and even if looked upon as a misstep, was really what brought the company to where it is today. 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.
- yarrel 12y ago
  It wasn't something new, it was their same tired old strategy of copying Apple without any understanding of what they were copying and with level after level of managerial air-brakes on doing anything right. 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.
  - eco 12y ago
    What about Windows 8 do you feel is copying Apple? The big changes are utterly unlike anything I see in OS X but maybe I'm missing something. 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.
youonlyliveonce 12y ago
Big companies making small mistakes is good for little guys :)
yarrel 12y ago
No, Microsoft are the new Lotus.
blinkingled 12y ago
> Furthermore Google appears to be making another old Microsoft error: deprioritizing mobile. > 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.
- ZoFreX 12y ago
  > Project Volta focused on Battery Life 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.
  - ocdtrekkie 12y ago
    More than likely, material design bloat ate any improvements in performance or battery life introduced by backend optimizations.
    - asadotzler 12y ago
hipsterrific 12y ago
My biggest pet peeve with Google has always been their slow roll out of non-search and ad products. They could have shook the ISP world with Google Fiber. They carry the clout necessary to get stuff done. Rather they did a slow roll out and that lottery style is less hopeful and more aggravating. 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.
- nostrademons 12y ago
  GFiber roll-out is largely gated on the local municipalities. It takes years to cut through the bureaucratic red-tape of getting a right-of-way to run fiber to the home, and in many cases, the utility poles they use are owned by their competitors. The reason they started with Kansas City was because it features an integrated city, county, and utility government, and so they could negotiate with one entity and get all the permits necessary without having to go between dozens of competing interests. Same reason it will never come to San Francisco; CEQA means that any single property-owner along the fiber route can block the whole project, and there are a number of homeowners in San Francisco who don't exactly like Google. 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.
- cloudwalking 12y ago
  Would you argue that Glass did not move the market, regardless of its success?
  - tashoecraft 12y ago
plnk22 12y ago
It's probably more accurate to say that Google has joined Microsoft as being a fast follower more than an innovator. Just look at Google+ attempting to follow FB's lead, and now GCE being a very obvious attempt to emulate AWS and EC2, similar to what Microsoft is trying to do with Azure. Then we have MS OneDrive and Google fast following Dropbox.
- itsbits 12y ago
  Also Inbox from MailBox
- scholia 12y ago
  Google Search vs Alta Vista, Gmail vs Hotmail? Not saying they didn't innovate, but not much comes out of a clear blue sky.... Buzz and Wave didn't get Google very far.
  - takluyver 12y ago
    I don't understand why we're so keen to criticise tech companies for copying one another. Companies doing similar things are competing, and we generally consider that a good thing. 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.
    - scholia 12y ago
      Agreed, and I'm not criticizing them for improving on one another's products. 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.
aburan28 12y ago
Google does not fulfill quarterly numbers and now they are doomed? They have $100 billion in cash and are in a position to expand into so many other markets and spends 15% of their top line revenue on R&D. Meanwhile Apple is attempting to build a car from scratch?
- adventured 12y ago
  $64.4 billion in cash as of the latest quarter.
- blumkvist 12y ago
  Expand into what exactly? Cloud hosting? Didn't work out. Home entertainment and automation? Sony and especially Microsoft have decades of r&d and experience. Amazon seems better positioned even. Then you have Apple. Things on the android side don't look too rosy. They are pissing partners every month and win10 is coming soon. Eric Schmidt sank novel with poor partner relations, just as a reminder.
cdnsteve 12y ago
So says a site that still forces full page ads before allowing content (with ads in it) like it were still 2001.
bsdpython 12y ago
I would say Microsoft has more in common with 1990 IBM i.e. huge entrenched profitable companies that missed the biggest shift in technology in the previous decade that they should have dominated (IBM: PCs, Microsoft: mobile). I still don't think people appreciate just how much Microsoft blew it by not owning the dominant mobile OS.
tsax 12y ago
Great. More 'X is the new Y' articles. I wonder if there's a list of cliches somewhere that get repeated by tech journalists every so often.
- pconner 12y ago
  Clickbait is the new journalism
  - tsax 12y ago
    Not just clickbait either. The whole article is a mish-mash of bad tech history analogies.
    - EugeneOZ 12y ago
      Thank you guys, I thought the whole world goes crazy if such a crappy set of "tech words" as this article can be upvoted to 250+ on HN.
sparkzilla 12y ago
The biggest complacency is in Google's search results, which are dated, scattershot, and the opposite of "The Old Google's" simplicity. Here's some of my thoughts: http://newslines.org/blog/googles-black-hole/ http://newslines.org/blog/googles-black-hole/ Moonshot projects are fine, if the core business is strong. When investors realize the core search business is brittle, Google will be in a lot of trouble.
Steko 12y ago
Take a drink if this article critical of Google is at a lower rank than we would expect. Currently: Rank 11 129 pts, 2 hours ago vs Rank 5 115 pts, 5 hours ago
ejz 12y ago
I see the comparison, and in some sense it's true. I do think that if we zoom out a bit, you could make a high-level comparison and have it hold some water. But I think that to do so would miss a really big point and give this article too much credit, since it focuses on small details. 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.
ocdtrekkie 12y ago
I've been saying this for over a year now. They've very much reversed roles. Market dominance has a huge effect on how a company acts, and Google is acting like the old monopoly trying to hang on.
dlu 12y ago
Rather uninteresting article. Microsoft still has a lot to do before becoming relevant again, and Google has to lose a lot before spiraling out of control. 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
fauigerzigerk 12y ago
Microsoft is not the new Google. Microsoft is the new IBM. They lost their dominant position and now they are unbundling like crazy, having realised that they need to be where the users are, not the other way around. 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.
- emp_zealoth 12y ago
  The maps itself are stellar But the app itself is horrendous to me (especially on Android) - a lot of advanced functionality was simply gutted out of it
gitdude 12y ago
This is complete crap! Look at the pipeline of awesome products - Inbox by Google, self-driving car, Project Loon, etc. etc. As long as Larry is on the helm, Google will never be Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft is becoming better under Nadella but is nowhere near Google
aceperry 12y ago
I have a completely different view of how Microsoft behaved when it was dominant, vs Google today. Back in the day, most of the tech industry feared Microsoft. MS had a monopoly over hardware and software companies and bullied everyone. Google today doesn't have this monopoly that Microsoft held. Even the author's description of Google's strengths, "Google’s pillars of ads and search have become its Windows and Office", aren't as dominant as MS' products and definitely not for as long either. So I think it's incorrect to say that Google has become the MS of old. Those were the bad old days, when MS dictated how things were done in the industry. 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.

275 points by hashx 12y ago

yes, Google is new ms. but ms could be either new Google or new Palm. I wish ms the best, since Apple is not fun anymore.

k-mcgrady 12y ago

Interesting take and I have to say I agree with it. Microsoft recent (1-2 years) moves have been pretty exciting and are coming to fruition. Google hasn't excited me in a while and the last few times they have the results have been less that stellar (Glass, Google Plus, Wear). It's great to see MS buy startups and keep them alive. Much more interesting to me than Google's purchase and kill strategy. e.g. MS bought Acompli, rebranded, and have a great mobile email solution. Google bought Sparrow (at the time the best mobile and desktop Gmail solution), killed it and didn't come out with anything better.

cowardlydragon 12y ago
Like buying nokia? About the only thing I've seen that is remotely interesting is supporting docker in Azure.
- wlesieutre 12y ago
  Putting .NET Core on Github? Visual Studio free for small teams? Surface Pro? Office across all platforms, many of them completely free? Giving away Windows 10? Maybe none of those are things you'd use, but to other people they're a pretty big deal.
  - plnk22 12y ago
    The writing was on the wall for MS's dev platform since open source dominates startups and the cloud. Nobody builds the next facebook or twitter using MS tools and Windows. If anything the rise of open source and linux put MS in a position where open sourcing their tools was the only option left to them to stay relevant. Making a show of 'loving' Linux was done in an attempt to give themselves a chance of getting a slice of the huge cloud computing market for hosting Linux. Make no mistake, Linux has put MS in a very uncomfortable position.
    - pconner 12y ago
      Stack Overflow (and its offshoots) was (is?) very MS-centric, but it's clearly in the minority.
      - aceperry 12y ago
        ??? 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.
        bramgg 12y ago
        pconner is talking about how Stack Overflow is hosted on Windows (and maybe uses other Microsoft products, I wouldn't know).
        aceperry 12y ago
        I had no idea that "MS-centric" meant your site is hosted on Windows. Thank you for clarifying that. IOW, WTF ???
        bramgg 12y ago
        > Thank you for clarifying that. No problem, it's wrong that your comment was downvoted. Even with my upvote it's still grey.
        pconner 12y ago
        http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflow-built-with/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflo... 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.
    - michael_h 12y ago
      > Nobody builds the next facebook or twitter using MS tools and Windows Well, then again: http://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/11/22/what-it-takes-to-run-stack-overflow/ http://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/11/22/what-it-takes-to-run-s...
cloudwalking 12y ago
Have you used Inbox?
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  Yes. I actually like it - but most people I've talked to don't want to manage email that way. I eventually switched away myself due to lack of support for other email providers & unified inbox.
  - themagician 12y ago
    Inbox is this really cool thing that doesn't work for anyone. It's awesome for categorizing transactional emails, but misses the mark for person-to-person communication. 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.
    - EugeneOZ 12y ago
      Don't talk for "anyone".
  - vowelless 12y ago
    It really baffles me how bad the GMail app on iOS is. I was hoping that Inbox would be a step up, but like you said, I don't want my email managed that way. 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.
    - Joeri 12y ago
      At least you have a gmail app. I'm on windows phone, aka the platform that google shuns completely and utterly (to the point of taking apps out of the market when they buy a company that has a windows phone app). I used to do everything in google's ecosystem because they were OS agnostic, but now they just want to lock me into android and chromebook. Thanks but no thanks. Microsoft has been forced to get it, their stuff works great on all platforms.

icehawk219 12y ago

In a way I'd argue that Google suffers from the same real underlying issue that started to cause Microsoft to fall: complacency. They see themselves as a king of the world that can't be beaten. And in a way they aren't strictly wrong right now. So many people will still jump up and defend and support everything Google for no reason other then "because Google!". But that's also starting to change. In my opinion the best thing that could happen to Google right now would be for them to take a market share hit.

suvelx 12y ago
While Google might be complacent. I don't know of a single Google product that I use that has a reasonable alternative. 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.
- AngusMcQuarrie 12y ago
  This is the same thing people said about Microsoft products in the 90s. Some of them (Like office for example) still are in that position.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  >> "I don't know of a single Google product that I use that has a reasonable alternative." 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.
  - wil421 12y ago
    I've resently made the switch back to Safari from Chrome and I can say that it seems faster and more responsive (which is why I went to chrome in the first place). Memory usuage is also less and I don't get a bunch of non responding Chrome Worker processes.

superbaconman 12y ago

I don't understand how Microsoft expects to keep developers working for their ecosystem when they're not building anything marginally better than their existing competition.

k-mcgrady 12y ago
Hololens? If they can pull it off that'll be a hugely important platform for developers. Businesses also still rely on Windows and will for a long time so there is plenty of financial reason for developers to remain part of that ecosystem.
- vezycash 12y ago
  This would be the perfect tagline for Hololens: Hololens - carry a cinema sized tv anywhere you go.
rockdoe 12y ago
One thing they've gotten better at is exactly that: it's no longer "their" ecosystem. They're much more heavily into standard HTML5 now than Google, for example. 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.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  That's what they're trying to do in THEORY but let's be frank, Windows 8's app ecosystem has flopped even if they're using HTML5/CSS and other standards.
  - rockdoe 12y ago
    But webapps still work fine on Windows, and they'll work on iOS and Android, too.
  - im2w1l 12y ago
    Microsoft should buy or clone Ninite.

aikah 12y ago

No. Microsoft is still the old Microsoft.Opensourcing a few libraries here and there dont make Microsoft the champion of open source. Microsoft is still forcing people to buy Windows licenses over and over again which each PC,and businesses using MS products are still subject to license audits. On the other hand, Google is becoming more and more like Microsoft.

ohitsdom 12y ago
Honestly, did you just read the title? Open source was not even a major point in the author's argument.
mohamedattahri 12y ago
I think you're confusing open-source with free.
cssmoo 12y ago
Some of us are quite happy to pay for it. 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)
- minthd 12y ago
  What tools are you using to gain such advantage?
  - cssmoo 12y ago
    Azure PaaS and VS. Azure allows us to sidestep a lot of iteration 0 and devops stuff and just hit the metal. VS is just pretty good at what it does.
    - 12y ago

jimrandomh 12y ago

What I found most interesting is how Google and Microsoft are in the process of swapping places with regards to open source: Microsoft is taking formerly-closed projects open (particularly their compiler and development tools), while Google is taking formerly-open projects closed (particularly Glass, which was a closed-source fork of Android).

cowardlydragon 12y ago
A free compiler and dev tools? Revolutionary. Or, completely the norm in Ruby, Python, Java... um, every other language. Did they OSS the IDE?
- jdmichal 12y ago
  You mean the Java for which the reference VM (Hotspot) and compiler were not open-sourced until November 13, 2006 [1], roughly corresponding with the Java 6 release? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#Sun.27s_promise_and_initial_release http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#Sun.27s_promise_and_ini...
- nvivo 12y ago
  The compilers for .net were always free and were in every installation of the framework since the first version on 2003. And there were open source IDEs for .NET since the beginning.
plnk22 12y ago
How much has MS truly open sourced? SQL Server? Windows? Visual Studio? MS Office? 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.
- nvivo 12y ago
  How much has google really open sourced? Think about it. Search engine? Gmail? Ad engine? Maps? Drive? Youtube? Nothing! 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.

Someone1234 12y ago

Windows 8 was actually a very brave move by Microsoft, and even if looked upon as a misstep, was really what brought the company to where it is today. 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.

yarrel 12y ago
It wasn't something new, it was their same tired old strategy of copying Apple without any understanding of what they were copying and with level after level of managerial air-brakes on doing anything right. 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.
- eco 12y ago
  What about Windows 8 do you feel is copying Apple? The big changes are utterly unlike anything I see in OS X but maybe I'm missing something. 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.

youonlyliveonce 12y ago

Big companies making small mistakes is good for little guys :)

yarrel 12y ago

No, Microsoft are the new Lotus.

blinkingled 12y ago

> Furthermore Google appears to be making another old Microsoft error: deprioritizing mobile. > 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.

ZoFreX 12y ago
> Project Volta focused on Battery Life 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.
- ocdtrekkie 12y ago
  More than likely, material design bloat ate any improvements in performance or battery life introduced by backend optimizations.
  - asadotzler 12y ago

hipsterrific 12y ago

My biggest pet peeve with Google has always been their slow roll out of non-search and ad products. They could have shook the ISP world with Google Fiber. They carry the clout necessary to get stuff done. Rather they did a slow roll out and that lottery style is less hopeful and more aggravating. 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.

nostrademons 12y ago
GFiber roll-out is largely gated on the local municipalities. It takes years to cut through the bureaucratic red-tape of getting a right-of-way to run fiber to the home, and in many cases, the utility poles they use are owned by their competitors. The reason they started with Kansas City was because it features an integrated city, county, and utility government, and so they could negotiate with one entity and get all the permits necessary without having to go between dozens of competing interests. Same reason it will never come to San Francisco; CEQA means that any single property-owner along the fiber route can block the whole project, and there are a number of homeowners in San Francisco who don't exactly like Google. 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.
cloudwalking 12y ago
Would you argue that Glass did not move the market, regardless of its success?
- tashoecraft 12y ago

plnk22 12y ago

It's probably more accurate to say that Google has joined Microsoft as being a fast follower more than an innovator. Just look at Google+ attempting to follow FB's lead, and now GCE being a very obvious attempt to emulate AWS and EC2, similar to what Microsoft is trying to do with Azure. Then we have MS OneDrive and Google fast following Dropbox.

itsbits 12y ago
Also Inbox from MailBox
scholia 12y ago
Google Search vs Alta Vista, Gmail vs Hotmail? Not saying they didn't innovate, but not much comes out of a clear blue sky.... Buzz and Wave didn't get Google very far.
- takluyver 12y ago
  I don't understand why we're so keen to criticise tech companies for copying one another. Companies doing similar things are competing, and we generally consider that a good thing. 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.
  - scholia 12y ago
    Agreed, and I'm not criticizing them for improving on one another's products. 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.

aburan28 12y ago

Google does not fulfill quarterly numbers and now they are doomed? They have $100 billion in cash and are in a position to expand into so many other markets and spends 15% of their top line revenue on R&D. Meanwhile Apple is attempting to build a car from scratch?

adventured 12y ago
$64.4 billion in cash as of the latest quarter.
blumkvist 12y ago
Expand into what exactly? Cloud hosting? Didn't work out. Home entertainment and automation? Sony and especially Microsoft have decades of r&d and experience. Amazon seems better positioned even. Then you have Apple. Things on the android side don't look too rosy. They are pissing partners every month and win10 is coming soon. Eric Schmidt sank novel with poor partner relations, just as a reminder.

cdnsteve 12y ago

So says a site that still forces full page ads before allowing content (with ads in it) like it were still 2001.

bsdpython 12y ago

I would say Microsoft has more in common with 1990 IBM i.e. huge entrenched profitable companies that missed the biggest shift in technology in the previous decade that they should have dominated (IBM: PCs, Microsoft: mobile). I still don't think people appreciate just how much Microsoft blew it by not owning the dominant mobile OS.

tsax 12y ago

Great. More 'X is the new Y' articles. I wonder if there's a list of cliches somewhere that get repeated by tech journalists every so often.

pconner 12y ago
Clickbait is the new journalism
- tsax 12y ago
  Not just clickbait either. The whole article is a mish-mash of bad tech history analogies.
  - EugeneOZ 12y ago
    Thank you guys, I thought the whole world goes crazy if such a crappy set of "tech words" as this article can be upvoted to 250+ on HN.

sparkzilla 12y ago

The biggest complacency is in Google's search results, which are dated, scattershot, and the opposite of "The Old Google's" simplicity. Here's some of my thoughts: http://newslines.org/blog/googles-black-hole/ http://newslines.org/blog/googles-black-hole/ Moonshot projects are fine, if the core business is strong. When investors realize the core search business is brittle, Google will be in a lot of trouble.

Steko 12y ago

Take a drink if this article critical of Google is at a lower rank than we would expect. Currently: Rank 11 129 pts, 2 hours ago vs Rank 5 115 pts, 5 hours ago

ejz 12y ago

I see the comparison, and in some sense it's true. I do think that if we zoom out a bit, you could make a high-level comparison and have it hold some water. But I think that to do so would miss a really big point and give this article too much credit, since it focuses on small details. 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.

ocdtrekkie 12y ago

I've been saying this for over a year now. They've very much reversed roles. Market dominance has a huge effect on how a company acts, and Google is acting like the old monopoly trying to hang on.

dlu 12y ago

Rather uninteresting article. Microsoft still has a lot to do before becoming relevant again, and Google has to lose a lot before spiraling out of control. 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

fauigerzigerk 12y ago

Microsoft is not the new Google. Microsoft is the new IBM. They lost their dominant position and now they are unbundling like crazy, having realised that they need to be where the users are, not the other way around. 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.

emp_zealoth 12y ago
The maps itself are stellar But the app itself is horrendous to me (especially on Android) - a lot of advanced functionality was simply gutted out of it

gitdude 12y ago

This is complete crap! Look at the pipeline of awesome products - Inbox by Google, self-driving car, Project Loon, etc. etc. As long as Larry is on the helm, Google will never be Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft is becoming better under Nadella but is nowhere near Google

aceperry 12y ago

I have a completely different view of how Microsoft behaved when it was dominant, vs Google today. Back in the day, most of the tech industry feared Microsoft. MS had a monopoly over hardware and software companies and bullied everyone. Google today doesn't have this monopoly that Microsoft held. Even the author's description of Google's strengths, "Google’s pillars of ads and search have become its Windows and Office", aren't as dominant as MS' products and definitely not for as long either. So I think it's incorrect to say that Google has become the MS of old. Those were the bad old days, when MS dictated how things were done in the industry. 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.