Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me
nytimes.com
Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me
#2This analysis is sorely lacking perspective. I could pick on a bunch of things but I'll just choose one to make my point.
Cringely's assertion that Google should fear making Google search not work on Windows PCs is ludicrous. Period. Anyone who seriously thinks any broadly successful (public) company would pull a stunt like that and piss off the vast bulk of their users has lost touch with reality.
Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me
#3This analysis is sorely lacking perspective. I could pick on a bunch of things but I'll just choose one to make my point. Cringely's assertion that Google should fear making Google search not work on Windows PCs is ludicrous. Period. Anyone who seriously thinks any broadly successful (public) company would pull a stunt like that and piss off the vast bulk of their users has lost touch with reality.
I'm glad you said it because to be honest I was thinking the same thing and was worried about getting flamed. But I'm with you.
After reading this my first thought was "Has the NY Times come to the point where their space is worth so little that they'll just let Cringley ramble on for a couple pages?" There's virtually no real insight here. Just a bunch of random observations from a guy whose been out of the loop for more than a decade.
Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me
#4Hm, a lot of opinions here, ranging in insight. This one was the most perceptive, in my opinion:
It’s not as if these companies are gearing up to produce automobiles. The engineering teams for any of these products are, at most, 20 to 30 people — immaterial for Microsoft, which has 90,000 or so employees, and Google, which has 20,000. Nor are all of Google’s products even guaranteed to ship, being as they are in that semi-solid technical state called beta test and subject to cancellation on a whim.
Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me
#5And don't forget Apple, which with the iPod and iPhone has shown an ability to revolutionize markets other companies saw as mature.
Did people really think MP3 players and phones were anywhere near "mature" before Apple's products? I remember getting my girlfriend a pre-iPod MP3 player back around 2002... she never figured out how to put her music on there, and ended up getting an iPod as soon as she started buying music via iTunes.
Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me
#6Hm, a lot of opinions here, ranging in insight. This one was the most perceptive, in my opinion: It’s not as if these companies are gearing up to produce automobiles. The engineering teams for any of these products are, at most, 20 to 30 people — immaterial for Microsoft, which has 90,000 or so employees, and Google, which has 20,000. Nor are all of Google’s products even guaranteed to ship, being as they are in that…
The problem with this statement is that Cringely has no way of knowing this and the facts publicly available contradict his account.
Just to give one example look at Steve Ballmer and Bing. Unless he's flat out lying he's going to spend 5% to 10% of Microsoft's operating income on Bing (http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/171648.asp). That's not exactly immaterial as Cringely claims.
Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me
#7This analysis is sorely lacking perspective. I could pick on a bunch of things but I'll just choose one to make my point. Cringely's assertion that Google should fear making Google search not work on Windows PCs is ludicrous. Period. Anyone who seriously thinks any broadly successful (public) company would pull a stunt like that and piss off the vast bulk of their users has lost touch with reality.
Not even the PR implications, but just the security/technical. How does an OS vendor block access to a website? Deny it in the hosts file? Add a default firewall rule? Code a special case in IE?
Any such incident would cause irrevocable damage with any government/enterprise and push them to abandon the platform entirely. As you say, it's just absurd.
Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me
#8And don't forget Apple, which with the iPod and iPhone has shown an ability to revolutionize markets other companies saw as mature. Did people really think MP3 players and phones were anywhere near "mature" before Apple's products? I remember getting my girlfriend a pre-iPod MP3 player back around 2002... she never figured out how to put her music on there, and ended up getting an iPod as soon as she started buying m…
The smart phone market is pretty far from "mature" right now.
I'd say it probably just crossed the chasm with the iPhone, and the bulk of the mainstream has yet to be converted.
Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me
#9The vast majority of Google searches are, of course, done on PCs running Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. It is not in Google’s real interest to displace these products, which have facilitated so much of its success.
I call bullshit. This suggests that if Windows and Internet Explorer were replaced by some other browser or OS, then people would search less on Google, which is ridiculous. As long as the number of people using the replacement products remain the same, the number of searches performed on Google should remain the same, all else remaining equal. It's not like Google searches run especially fast on Windows and IE.
Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me
#10Hm, a lot of opinions here, ranging in insight. This one was the most perceptive, in my opinion: It’s not as if these companies are gearing up to produce automobiles. The engineering teams for any of these products are, at most, 20 to 30 people — immaterial for Microsoft, which has 90,000 or so employees, and Google, which has 20,000. Nor are all of Google’s products even guaranteed to ship, being as they are in that…
The problem with this statement is that Cringely has no way of knowing this and the facts publicly available contradict his account. Just to give one example look at Steve Ballmer and Bing. Unless he's flat out lying he's going to spend 5% to 10% of Microsoft's operating income on Bing ( http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/171648.asp ). That's not exactly immaterial as Cringely claims.
According to Ohloh, there are 199 committers to Chromium:
http://www.ohloh.net/p/chrome/contributors?page=1
A few of them probably don't work for Google, some are duplicates, but still nowhere near 20-30 people.