Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me • Hacker News Board

Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me

#11

Post by blasdel » Mon, Jul 13, 2009, 7:22 AM UTC

TomOfTTB wrote: post #6

andreyf wrote: post #4

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

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.

All of that spending thus far has been on marketing / advertising bullshit.

They're probably blowing piles of money on datacenters too, but they'd be doing that anyway even if the Bing thing never happened. They see Google doing it and feel left out!

Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me

#12

Post by edw519 » Mon, Jul 13, 2009, 1:24 PM UTC

Yesterday's Office Depot flyer had 12 laptops and 1 desktop, exactly the reverse of 3 years ago. Who knows, in 3 years it may have 12 handhelds and 1 laptop.

One thing's for sure. If your software has problems running on smaller and smaller hardware, you're doomed. Just ask DEC, Wang, Qantel, Basic4, Data General, etc.

With Chrome, Google is attacking Microsoft's Achilles heel. If Microsoft's response is another Vista, it should be interesting.

Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me

#13

Post by ytNumbers » Mon, Jul 13, 2009, 2:07 PM UTC

kalid wrote: post #7

hillel wrote: post #2

This 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.

Absurd? Ludicrous? Okay, maybe it's a bit of a stretch, but if you look at Microsoft's long track record of harming consumers, I wouldn't bet the farm against it.

http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepape...

Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me

#14

Post by symesc » Mon, Jul 13, 2009, 2:25 PM UTC

Uh, Bob, what happened?

Executives at Google and Microsoft are delivering solutions to "remind" each other that they exist?

I'm going to go back to some of your older blog posts to remind myself that you can add something to the conversation.

Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me

#15

Post by jojhbugbt » Mon, Jul 13, 2009, 2:26 PM UTC

kalid wrote: post #7

hillel wrote: post #2

This 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.

Like a computer where you can only buy apps from a single site owned by the maker and only connect to the net through a single service provider - no consumer would ever go for that.

Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me

#16

Post by andreyf » Mon, Jul 13, 2009, 2:33 PM UTC

aboodman wrote: post #10

TomOfTTB wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, that's an order of magnitude more than I expected... now I'm really curious how many full-time engineers Google pays to develop Chrome.

Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me

#17

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 13, 2009, 2:46 PM UTC

hillel wrote: post #2

This 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.

[deleted]

Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me

#18

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 13, 2009, 3:14 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me

#19

Post by Elepsis » Mon, Jul 13, 2009, 3:18 PM UTC

andreyf wrote: post #4

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

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

Re: Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me

#20

Post by rfreytag » Mon, Jul 13, 2009, 4:33 PM UTC

I have found Cringely to be usually essentially correct even if he is wrong on details. You just have to know which details are important and which are not. The strategic importance of Windows to Google and for Microsoft of not again getting the attention of the Justice Department by anti-competitively squeezing Google functionality on Windows (now that Bush is out of office) is absolutely correct.

Microsoft is clearly going to provide Google enough competition that they cannot roam too far into Microsoft's profit center. And Google is absolutely focused on Search using OSes to press the market (including Microsoft) in directions that Google needs to maintain its position and grow it.

Cringely is absolutely correct on the points that matter here. Contrary arguments centered on staffing sizes and such are I think probably correct but missing the point.