> 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?
It's not a bunch of baloney. If you have used Nexus 5 post-lollipop you will experience significantly decreased battery life. http://blog.gsmarena.com/benchmarking-android-5-0-lollipop-b... Project volta doesn't mean improved battery life. There are many factors to battery life that are not addressed by Project Volta.
It's a major release with ton of changes - there are going to be bugs. That doesn't mean entire release was useless.
Besides this article isn't about execution quality - it is about where Google's alleged lack of focus is - it said Lollipop was all about Material design focus where as in reality feature focus wise it was a well balanced release.
Since there might be a bunch of Nexus 5 "me too" users reading this. The immediate solution to the memory leaks and battery issues are to reboot into recovery and clear the cache every 2 weeks or so. This is what I've been doing for a month and it hasn't been so bad as before.
Same. Disabling dynamic floating preview (keyboard) also helps. For an extra boost, though it may be a stretch for some, get in dev mode and disable animations.
Agree, I've observed the same for L on Nexus 5, and battery life is not the only problem there, there seems to be a system memory leak that constantly eating up free memory until even the launcher is killed... I had way more free memory, and no leak on JB.
The problem is Google is coupling improvements in performance and battery life on the backend with additional bloat on the frontend with all their design/animation stuff. So we're not actually getting any real gains here.
Is this kind of a glass half empty thing? The dramatically more popular Galaxy S5 saw a significantly improved battery life. If we just include those data points, and average across users of Android, it was a huge net win for users.
This article is clickbait garbage (again a "contributor"), and it allows people to ply their grievances as if they are canonical.
According to Google. According to independent benchmarks, battery life got worse on a whole slew of devices.
> They changed the entire runtime to ART for performance
But did it actually get faster? Not by much.
> Material design was a much needed solution to coherent UI across Google's properties
Are the UIs coherent across Google's properties? Half a year on the answer is still no: Implementation is spotty across the first-party apps, many of which directly violate the guidelines given to developers.
It's a new runtime, and expected to get better and faster. If you don't like it that much, and you sound like you really HATE Android, maybe you should use something else. You'll feel better.
I think it's kind of unfair to accuse me of hating Android because I criticise it. I've been using Android since 1.6, always been a big fan, but as a power user and a developer I'm much more aware of Android's shortcomings than any Apple fanboy could possibly be.
Maybe I've conflated your response with others here who seem to have a huge dislike for Android and an obvious bias against anything Google. If that's not you then I apologize for the misunderstanding. I can understand being realistic about a platform and providing criticism, but a lot of the comments here can truly be characterized as hate.
As I understand it, Material (and Microsoft's Metro, interestingly) aims to be better on battery compared to predecessors if only because it's a simpler UI with larger plain blocks of color, minimal decorations, and far fewer "expensive" effects like gradients or translucence\transparency. That doesn't mean said wins aren't immediately consumed by other parts of the system, even other parts of Material UI widgetry. Regardless, the simpler flatter design frees up some resources (battery, ultimately) which can then be used for other things, like smooth animations and transitions.
>> "And they are focusing on moonshot projects for exactly the same reason that article claims is Google's problem - being complacent."
MS Research has been doing this kind of thing for years. Most of the projects never go anywhere. Google isn't the first company to do R&D - they're just really public about it to try and improve their public image.
Just in case you needed some backup for this point:
Google X started sometime in 2009-2010. In the time its been around only one project - the project around "Engineered Architecture" was successful and the team was able to form a company called Flux (https://www.flux.io).
Funny, they're being sued now by the architect they brought in with the idea for the program:
Microsoft research vs Google is an interesting case, especially considering that Google's glucose sensing contact lens project originaly started at microsot research, but Novartis is licensing them from Google.
Google is trying and delivering a whole lot more than MS Research ( did MS ever have a public prototype for anything?) - Glass, Self Driving Cars, Google Now are all tangible things that show concrete effort to make entirely new products and also make existing products better. They may not all be instant consumer hits but the point was about complacency - and this isn't complacency, it's the exact opposite.
Microsoft became complacent with WinMO, even few office releases were meh. Windows stagnated until security blunders forced them to react. Google on the other hand isn't being complacent with GMail (Inbox), Android (Lollipop), Chrome (v41) or Search (Google Now).
>> "Google is trying and delivering a whole lot more than MS Research ( did MS ever have a public prototype for anything?) - Glass, Self Driving Cars, Google Now are all tangible things that show concrete effort to make entirely new products and also make existing products better."
Glass flopped. Self-driving cars haven't been released and there are plenty of people working on that (Google just makes a big PR thing out of it) and Google Now is great (although hardly one of their moonshots?).
>> "Google on the other hand isn't being complacent with GMail (Inbox), Android (Lollipop), Chrome (v41) or Search (Google Now)."
Inbox is certainly interesting but most people I know don't like it. I did like it but moved away due to rising features. Lollipop killed my battery life and slowed my device to a crawl. Chrome has become sluggish and bloated. Like I said Google Now is great but only if I give Google all my data and give up all my privacy (search history, location history).
Agree. Inbox is an OK product but nowhere close to expectation. It's a product of mixing ideas, not a product of revealing essence.
Daniel Eran Dilger, the apple fanboy had a brilliant observation on John Sculley's Apple:
"In general, Sculley's Apple consistently produced ambitious but unrealistic technology plans that attempted to over-achieve at a price that failed to capture a sustainable segment of the market. " (http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/7C942A13-E006-4EBB-A4...)
Yes, I think Larry Page is another John Sculley.
Edit:
Actually I think GoogleX projects are fine, b/c they are in fact PR projects: couple of billions here and there to maintain a hi-tech myth. Money well spent!
The problem is the products like realtime search, Buzz and G+. They are ill designed, poor planed, poor executed and have 0 substance.
Yes i agree Google-X plans are ambitious.It's really hard to tell how unrealistic are they, but they did achieve some pretty brilliant results(self driving car driving 700K miles, Google loon progress[1]), And as for price, Google do seem to be mindful of prices. As examples: their self driving car, used as a taxi would be very affordable,Google loon is aimed at the 3rd world(so they surely planed for costs),Their glucose lens don't seem expensive(electronics are usually cheap) - but surely sell for a good price.
Lollipop killed my battery life and slowed my device to a crawl.
Given how profound you seem to think most everything of Google sucks (seen in a multitude of posts of yours throughout this thread), I'm curious what device you have that Lollipop "killed"? I'm going to call bullshit
HN has seen a HUGE influx of Microsoft shills, and it's getting disconcerting.
And an almost immediate karma punishing (-11 in less than a minute), despite this story sitting on the second page. Does Microsoft give an extra bonus if you sign up for HN? The astroturfing PR efforts have gotten quite a bit more pronounced. It feels like the glorious Slashdot days of old.
I have to agree with you about the MS shills. Seems pretty bizarre, especially with all of the hate on Google that appeared instantly here. They also include incredible love for MS products, which I don't see anywhere else. Sure feels like an astroturf campaign.
No love for MS here. Nexus 5, Nexus 7. Battery and speed. The 7+lollipop was a bummer for me, I used to be kinda proud of it. Now it needs ongoing maintenance (cache clearing).
All complex software has bugs, and Android has become enormous (I tried to update AOSP earlier this month and gave up after about 40GB of repo deltas. This enormous activity, itself, completely invalidates the garbage linked post).
This post and a large percentage of the comments, and the moderation, is essentially a "shit on Google" post, somehow trying to make Microsoft look better in some relative sense. It is terrible fanboy noise.
And the gent I responded to just picked up someone else's grievances. I would wager good money they have no Android device "ruined" by Lollipop. They just want to legitimize their walls of anti-Google screeds.
EDIT: I've really riled up some astorturfers. Any post I make is almost immediately attacked.
There's a lot of weird language and engineering research that they do that then propagates back into the developer ecosystem--I think you aren't giving near enough credit there.
I agree with your point, but looking at the projects,there's a clear difference between the companies: most of MS's projects(maybe except hololens) have large business value risk, on top of the technical risk.
On the other hand, most of Google's projects don't have much of a business value risk. If they'll work well, most likely they'll make good deal of money(unless the competition wins - but i believe Google also thinks hard on making projects hard to copy , or some other substitute challenges the market - but hey what can you do?)
> Also remember that Google brought us HTTP/2 when Microsoft and Apple were completely ignoring the web.
You only have that half-right, Microsoft hasn't been ignoring the web for several years, but Apple still is. The problem for Microsoft is that it can't move the web anymore. The center of gravity is in mobile and they don't have any market share there. Apple doesn't want to move the web, their walled garden is making much more money for them and there's no need for competition.
Apple is damn right for ignoring the web, JS is an extremely immature language (I say that working with it everyday, even with ES6 and experimental ES7 features).
Developing a real app with JS, where you have rewrite everything that's already in UIKit, Foundation, etc from the ground up, sucks ass. Your app is automatically slower, less APIs to work with, and is extremely limited in technologies. It can't do layout or many features better than the frameworks that countless engineers at Apple built and work on.
It's waaay less about walled garden and more about quality and the philosophy of the web. Is the web supposed to be what many of us want it to be? I love that browsers are being beefed up, but it increases the attack surface for hackers, increases more points of failure in your application because of some weird quirk by one vendor, there will be 20 people with 20 different frameworks and 20 different ways on how to do an app the right way, and most important, newbies will become extremely overwhelmed by the noise and lack of direction in on the platform.
If the web was a better platform, apps would not be so successful. But it's not (for now), it sucks so horribly and keeps me frustrated. We need more companies like Facebook (React) and Google (less so because of their scatter brain strategy: Angular, Web Components, Polymer, whatever Gmail and Youtube are built on) that shape the web
MS still has lion's share of the desktop and enterprise though - they could have put out something open like SPDY with IIS and IE support built in and that would have made a difference.
Need some updated examples. Those are very old features. It's nice that Apple has done some good things on the Web but they are not a leading actor and we shouldn't pretend that they are.
>The httpbis working group considered Google's SPDY protocol, Microsoft's HTTP Speed+Mobility proposal (SPDY based),[5] and Network-Friendly HTTP Upgrade.[11] In July 2012 Facebook provided feedback on each of the proposals and recommended HTTP/2 be based on SPDY.[12] The initial draft of HTTP/2 was published in November 2012 and is based on a straight copy of SPDY.[13]
It rather looks to me as if Microsoft arranged the article, as it is rather partisan, and then organised the comments - so the article and comments taken together indicate that Microsoft is still the old Microsoft. It is fairly easy to distinguish between the genuine comments and the deceitful ones. Typically, the latter have a somewhat unpleasing tone.
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.
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.
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.
The Azure giveaway for startups is nice, but I don't think the cloud is MS's main goal here. It's about PR and company perception. They need to lure developers back to the ecosystem so that their app store can stop being an empty wasteland. That's why they're giving out VS, that's why they're giving free updates to Windows 10, and that's why they're trying to improve their image in the developer community. Without developers writing good software for Windows, people are going to keep hating the OS.
The other thing the store brings is a centralized source for reputable software downloads. The malware-infested download.com and its ilk are a huge issue for your average Windows user. Putting downloads in one place, making them sortable by popularity and ratings, and making it easy to pay for things would make a huge difference for the user experience. There was a bit of an uproar when Apple did it in OS X, but now it's an expected feature.
It's funny how Windows used to be the OS that had all the 3rd party software written for it. Now for any given task OS X tends to have one or two really great options, and Windows tends to have a pile of 50 abandoned weekend projects and open source UI trainwrecks but nothing you'd actually enjoy using.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd seriously contest your assertion about Vista being a "modest improvement" over XP. Although from the perspective of the UI you could argue that Aero was just a glossier version of the basic 95-era desktop theme, the core OS modifications were massive.
Meh. Windows 8 was the last straw for me. I was on every Windows release since 3.1. With 8, I finally decided to move to the Mac for my desktop, at work and home. At home, I need Lightroom, which precluded Linux.
I agree that Windows 8 was bold, but it was still a mis-step in that it assumed a touch screen. Using a mouse with that UI was an exercise in frustration.
Windows 8 was more of marketing and positioning failure than a technical one. It should have just been a mobile-only fork of the OS with a completely different name (Surface OS would have been fine). By muddling the waters and wasting effort on the desktop, Microsoft confused users and produced a product not completely up to par.
But windows 8 was SOOOOO bad, and destroyed any credibility MS has to make any competent usability decision and showed a complete lack of understanding of the user...
Do they have any choice but to do UI changes in-beta for Win10?
See, I do not understand people who say Windows 8 was "sooooooooo bad". It was not bad in the slightest. It ran extremely well. It had a different UI. That's it. And even with that, the 8.1 update brought back much of the old UI stuff.
That's your answer. Users hate drastic UI changes, especially ones that optimized for a specific experience (touchscreen) different from what they're using it for.
W8 is a beast of a performer, but the Metro UI killed it for many users.
I went laptop shopping last year. Tried out a bunch of different Windows 8 machines, and they confused and frustrated me. I couldn't figure out how to get rid of the weather app I accidentally tapped, for instance. (Which is something I have no need for. Also: what the hell would I use a touch-screen for when I have a keyboard and mouse? EVERY windows machine I looked at had a touch-screen -- a feature I absolutely did not want.)
Long story short: I bought a MacBook. I would never have considered using an Apple product if Windows 8 hadn't been so frustrating to try to use.
Yes, I could have learned to use Windows 8. But if I am going to learn something new, I'm going to try to select smartly from all the systems available, and Windows is only a small part of that. In other words, Windows 8 forced me to make a decision that I wouldn't have even made if those computers had Windows 7 on them. If they had Windows 7, I would have just bought one and got to work.
I suppose I can thank MS for my newfound love of Linux. If they hadn't forced me to learn something new, I might have stuck with what I knew: Windows.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Google has a secret natural monopoly, like Peter Thiel says are the goal of new companies.
The secret monopoly is that they use humans as adjuncts in rating websites, not just algos. I saw this on a Quora Q&A one time. Such human input would be most efficient as a non-duplicated effort: a monopoly. I would be interested to hear if I am wrong about this information.
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.
>> "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.
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.
I've switched between Chrome and Safari for years - always preferring Safari. However Safari was always too buggy to use consistently. The latest version is very stable in my experience which was it's biggest drawback previously.
> Just none of them really hold up against Google's products. They all work, just nowhere near as well as they should.
At the risk of sounding like the old dude in the room (only 34 lol) ... I'd almost swear that I've read a variation of this exact sentence 15 years ago on places like slashdot. Just replace Google with Microsoft ... all their products "just worked", just, nowhere near as they could ;)
I tend to swing back and forth with you on this point. Like a lot of us here I don't like the idea to subscribing my entire digital footprint with Google. So I'm currently using a mix of Google products and non-Google products (sometimes redundantly). Some non-Google products work great and fit my needs entirely. That being said, I just can't seem to let go of Google entirely.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
I'd go further and hypothesize that it's only a matter of time before Windows is open-sourced. The main obstacle to that has historically been a perceived need to sell each and every copy of Windows at a massive markup, but the current trends indicate - to me at least - that Microsoft is slowly warming up to the idea of being to Windows as Red Hat is to its variety of GNU/Linux or Google is to Android: use it as a vehicle to deliver a product (Red Hat's support contracts, Google's ad delivery and such) rather than the product in and of itself.
Here, Microsoft will still make plenty of money; businesses would still want support contracts, after all, so Windows could be monetized like RHEL with Microsoft selling support contracts to medium and large enterprises. Selling Windows itself has been an obsolete business model for quite some time, and I have a good feeling that Microsoft is now starting to realize that.
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?
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.
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
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/ 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.
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.
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.
And yes we did get an audit and had to fork out a couple of average developers' salaries but to be honest we're fucking rolling in cash thanks to them, so meh. Time to market is stupid low - we can have stuff up on Azure and making cash before the Java guys have started Eclipse and the python guys have provisioned their virtual envs and written their first wsgi handler.
(for ref, we do run some Linux kit on Azure but it's memcached and ops stuff)
Plus we were on AWS before and that went down. We had our own racks in a DC on Linux+Java before and that went down.
Shit happens. Architectural decisions are the way around it.
Bar one unusually large fuck up, most of the whinging about Azure comes from not RTFM and assuming it's a magic unicorn poo launcher and not a bunch of servers in a building somewhere with a light abstraction over the top.
I've had reboots on amazon with linux, and google cloud was down last night and it's Linux. On amazon my entire region was out for almost an entire day once.
That's the cloud, you will have downtime anywhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Have you heard about .NET? It's one of the best frameworks out there, very well supported, has been improving steadly for the last years and now that it's open source, I only expect more.
Yes, there are some minor things that other new frameworks do better, but this is normal, any framework needs time to adapt. But in general, there is not a single thing that .NET is not attacking in all the current trends of development.
In fact, a lot of things are being based on .NET, including javascript 7 features like async functions and Netflix's RxJava that is a port of .NET Rx.
I'm not saying it's the absolute best framework out there, but it is pretty good. Saying Microsoft is doing nothing in this area is just crazy.
Is dotNET better than the collective JVM language ecosystem from a feature standpoint? Probably not. Sure you want to limit the debate to Java, which is basically a legacy language.
The JVM software ecosystem is still much better than dotNET, which took forever to get Hibernate and other framework ports over to it, and the typical developer still takes all microsoft-dictated "best practices" as canon from the holy see.
Not anymore. It's open source now, and that's the point the OP was making.
edit: Wait, downvoted? Am I wrong? I'd love to know if I have a misunderstanding of the situation. I thought MS opensourced .net and CLR and everything.
While true, this blanket statement does a disservice to the actual situation. The parts of the language/CIL stack that make .NET important -- apps on Windows -- remains closed. It is only the ASP web stack that has been open-sourced, and can now be run on non-Windows platforms. When the WinForm libraries are open-sourced (and, perhaps, Visual Studio), then there can be an honest evaluation about ".NET" being open sourced. That's my opinion, anyway, as a 20-year Linux fan and current .NET Windows developer. I don't have enough rep to downvote anyone.
As a 12 year .NET developer and linux user I can't express how much I disagree with you. First because saying that nowadays windows apps is more important than asp.net is crazy talk. Most development is web nowadays and will just increase.
Second because what is being open sourced is not "the rest of the framework", but what is needed to build a new framework today, without the dependencies and problems from yesterday. The team announced that in time, even wpf and other windows stuff would be built on top of the new corefx as additional libraries.
The new corefx is not an asp.net only thing. It's just that asp.net is the most demanded and also the least dependent part of the framework to start this change.
There is still a lot of things to be done in order to achieve that, but I'm pretty sure it will happen because once things like collections and linq start evolving on corefx, they won't want to maintain two distinct frameworks.
Take a look at the most discussed topics on github, there is a lot of stuff being discussed there by the core team.
Not sure there would be any point to unsigned integers in Java. Most cases where you would want to use them you are better off writing in C and calling it via JNI. That's what is done on Android when you need performance, anyway, that or RenderScript.
Developers who use the MS ecosystem knows that their tooling is what makes MS ecosystem worth it. They released Community edition of Visual Studio which is the same as VS Professional but for open-source and independent developers.
.net core is now open source and can run on Linux/OS X. It can also use docker, that just made my skill set more appealing. These "marginal" improvements are actually huge steps for developers. For one, MS is leveraging what non-MS developers utilize. Doing so will make their product flexible and developers happy. WPF is getting a boost so that a single app can be written for multiple viewports in Windows 10. That'll simplify development.
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.
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.
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.
What competition? Microsoft may be shunned by startups/hackers (that could change quickly if they keep turning the ship the way they've been), but in your average boring old cube farm they are absolutely ahead of other sellers in both product quality and revenue.
They are also shunned by many large shops on the server-side. Where I work now (70,000+ people), there is a strict "no Microsoft on the servers" policy.
The "average boring old cube farm" uses Java. Microsoft = Windows + Office.
> 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.