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Comments: 336 +- Search: Google-Microsoft Crossfire Will Hit Consumers on Sunday November 29, @10:47AM
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theodp writes "Newsweek's Dan Lyons doesn't know who will be the winner in Google and Microsoft's search battle, but that's not stopping him from picking a loser — consumers. As we head towards a world where some devices may be free or really cheap, consumers should prepare to be bombarded by ads or pay a premium to escape them. 'The sad truth is that Google and Microsoft care less about making cool products than they do about hurting each other,' concludes Lyons. 'Their fighting has little to do with helping customers and a lot to do with helping themselves to a bigger slice of the money we all spend to buy computers and surf the Internet. Microsoft wants to ruin Google's search business. Google wants to ruin Microsoft's OS business. At the end of the day, they both seem like overgrown nerdy schoolboys fighting over each other's toys.'"
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Business as usual (Score:5, Insightful)
The sad truth is that Google and Microsoft care less about making cool products than they do about hurting each other,' concludes Lyons. 'Their fighting has little to do with helping customers and a lot to do with helping themselves to a bigger slice of the money we all spend to buy computers and surf the Internet.
For anyone else joining the real world, enjoy your stay. A business making money? This is madness!
This seem to be just an another story of a Google fanboy in his basement discovering that their do-no-evil "friend" is a normal company, a normal business which purpose is to generate revenue. He hasn't yet understood that money doesn't grow in trees and this is how our economy works. For him Microsoft seems like a bad guy because they dare to sell products at a price. Google is the 'cool and hippy' friend who offers everything for free. And what he doesn't understand is that the revenue is just generated other way, and he loses her privacy to an advertisement company. Google is not a search engine company, it's an advertisement company that uses internet searching to 1) gather very detailed information and usage statistics about people all over the internet 2) sell targeted ads to advertisers.
It's unnecessary to blame the companies how it is. "Making cool products" and not caring about business sounds more like a public service or some teenagers naive thinking before he comes contact with the real world. Of course two competing companies are going to.. eh, compete. That's how it works, that's how they generate income, but that's also how they're always on a run to improve their products.
If there weren't competing companies, it would be a lot worse situation. Just look at how the adsl and cable internet is in USA. People pretty much have only one choice of operator, and it's shitty. In lots of European countries there's many competing ISP's and you get faster and better service.
At the end of the day, they both seem like overgrown nerdy schoolboys fighting over each other's toys.
They're the exact opposite. They're businesses that have a clean plan and understand what they are doing. Microsoft wants more marketshare on search, Google wants more users locked in to their services to keep their 70% marketshare. Oh, you though Google wants to fight for OS marketshare? Just see how limited Chrome OS is. It's designed to offer people Google's services so they will be locked down in them. That's the whole idea behind it, not fighting to destroy Windows.
Re:Business as usual (Score:5, Insightful)
One slight detail that I hope wont get in the way of your ranting:
ChromeOS is a web OS, and in the browser you can do everything you can do in your regular browser, like changing your search engine to 'Bing', using MS Office 2010 online or Zohoo office, Yahoo mail, and any other competing web service you desire.
Web is the very opposite of a vendor lock-in, there's an unlimited amount of choice and Google always seems to do their best to allow for competition, the best practical example of this is how easy it is to change the search engine in Chrome to Bing vs the hiding of the Google search option in IE8.
Sure, Google does believe that 'anything that is good for the web will also be good for Google', so having powerful devices and browsers that make the web an attractive platform will also be good for Google in the end (more searches, more ads, more docs, more maps and location services, more waving, etc), but in no way are they locking people into any platform or product
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Google WANTS vendor lock-in (Score:4, Interesting)
No when you're using ChromeOS the way google describes it deployed on the ARM-based netbooks ... everything climatologically signed, and no unauthorized software, no local applications, not even an installed print driver; if the netbook detects tampering, it re-images itself "from the cloud."
I'd rather pay the $25 Microsoft tax and buy a netbook that I can wipe down and install what *I* want on it.
Netbooks are $250 ... by Christmas 2010, they'll be $200. The only people that are going to want a "free google 'welfarebook' with your 24-month wireless internet data contract - some conditions apply, yadda yadda yadda rip-off contract" will be those who can't come up with $200. Far from "do no evil", this will be "gouge the poor."
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Re:Google WANTS vendor lock-in (Score:5, Insightful)
The only people that are going to want a "free google 'welfarebook' with your 24-month wireless internet data contract - some conditions apply, yadda yadda yadda rip-off contract" will be those who can't come up with $200. Far from "do no evil", this will be "gouge the poor."
I don't see how you can call providing a free $200 device to use a service they want anyway as "gouging". Sounds like a damn good deal to me. It's going to cost them around $600 a year to connect to the internet anyway, how is offering a portable service plus a $200 device "gouging"?
Nobody needs a portable laptop with wireless internet. People want such a thing, but people also want Ferraris. You can hardly say Ferrari gouges the poor because their cars are so expensive. It would be especially hard to argue that Microsoft gouges the poor by offering to lease a $1 million car for $1k per month if you agree to drive it around with their logo on the side for as long as you kept the car. I WISH they would do such a thing, everybody would be able to drive Ferraris then!
That's pretty much what you're calling "gouging" here. It doesn't make any sense.
Do you even understand what gouging is? It's certainly not bundling all kinds of free goodies with a service, that's basically the opposite of what gouging is. Gouging is when you know consumers MUST buy your product, so you jack the price up far more than it costs to produce the product and offer a low level of service. It's pretty much impossible to "gouge" on a product that people don't need to buy at all. It usually happens with things like utilities, gas, groceries, and other regular necessary consumables.
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With corporations (Score:4, Insightful)
You should always assume the worst. It's the only way to keep a company in check.
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Re:Business as usual (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.dataliberation.org/ [dataliberation.org]
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Re:Business as usual (Score:5, Informative)
As the other poster pointed out, Google makes a serious commitment to not locking you in, so much so that there's an internal team that works with all product groups to make sure the end users retain those essential freedoms, the result of that is available at http://www.dataliberation.org/ [dataliberation.org]
I personally know of no other company that has such an initiative (would be awesome to see MS do the same though, but somehow I'm not entirely hopeful that we'll see that day).
So what exactly are you basing your information on? I mean, I know it's the year of 'bashing Google' in Chinese astrology or something, but I mean cmon, lets keep some facts in the discussion or all we're doing is random trolling
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Re:Business as usual (Score:5, Insightful)
Which other company have a "do no evil" rule?
So, Google have good PR. Now can you point to one corporate decision they've made where 'do no evil' has been the deciding factor? Where they've chosen to do something that might harm their profit margins, rather than do something that they might judge to be evil?
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Re:Business as usual (Score:5, Interesting)
So when you're choosing a cloud app, you make a point of using "how easy is it to get my data out of this thing" as one of your criteria.
Just like when you're choosing a local app. You do that, right?
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Re:Business as usual (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference is that with a local app, your data is on your own machine. So in the cloud you can add the question "how easy is it for others to get my data out of this thing?"
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Re:Business as usual (Score:5, Insightful)
"Casual people" will learn. Once bitten, twice shy. Just as anyone who bought DRM'd AAC files from iTunes learned, the first time they tried to play them on a non-Apple device.
Yes, it's about user stupidity. And that's exactly what Google is going for (and MS too).
Google is going out of its way to make exporting easy - http://www.dataliberation.org/ [dataliberation.org]. I haven't looked at MS's offerings.
You're right that an unethical provider of cloud services could lock its customers in. I don't believe Google is doing that.
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Re:Business as usual (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is why the iPod has gone from #1 to last place in the mp3 player market. Wait, no. That hasn't happened.
Um. I don't follow you.
I have an iPod. I *like* my iPod.
But I won't buy DRM'd tracks from the iTunes store, because I want to be able to play the music I buy on my iPod *and* on my no-name supermarket MP3 player.
Now, I knew the issues before getting stung. But imagine the person who's spent hundreds of dollars on iTunes tracks, then buys, some other MP3 device with the very reasonable expectation that they'll be able to play it.
That's someone who's once bitten, and should be twice shy. It doesn't mean they won't buy another iPod -- indeed, it even means they're more likely to buy another iPod, though gnashing their teeth as they do. It does mean that in future they'll be asking more questions about what they can do with files they buy or create.
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Re:Business as usual (Score:5, Informative)
As for the cloud, again, I want to be able to "Save as ... " to my hard drive. Google MAY JUST HAVE the very best application on earth for any given purpose, but if I can't move my data to wherever, whenever, in any given format, then it's worth about ten pounds of shit in a five pound sack.
Fortunately you can.
http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=49115 [google.com]
I honestly don't know why people assume this obviously necessary functionality isn't there.
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Re:Business as usual (Score:5, Informative)
It gets pretty cumbersome if you have 1000s of files ... exporting them one at a time. Hence the lock-in.
Again with the assuming you can't do something.
I'm not providing the link again. Several people have done so within this thread.
Suffice to say, you can select multiple Google Docs and export them all at once. You can even get at them through an API.
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Re:Business as usual (Score:4, Interesting)
Also keep in mind that converting all your Word files to a different format is quite a bit more cumbersome.
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Re:Business as usual (Score:5, Funny)
Why should Google-haters have to go to the trouble of reading instructions, doing things, etc to get to their sacred data?? Google should just transmit the data over the air into their brains. This is an outrage! When will Google just do the simplest of things?!? Google is evil, I say, eeeeeeee-vil!
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Re:Business as usual (Score:4, Insightful)
> Is that a joke? Willfully choosing to use a better product means you're "locked in"? Are you from washington DC?
No. It's your rhetoric that is a joke.
Nearly no one ever "chose" to use WinDOS. It just happens to be what all the hardware vendors try to force feed customers.
It's been this way since it was MS-DOS competing against Apple and everyone else that had GUI based systems.
Now if you are talking about people "choosing Apple's walled garden", then you are onto something.
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Re:Business as usual (Score:4, Informative)
Safari isn't a Google product, so it has basically no relevance at all to what he was saying.
Also, you can change [macosxhints.com] the search engine to something else if you really are that committed to using something inferior.
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Re:Business as usual (Score:4, Insightful)
ChromeOS requires a google ID to log in. Imagine that, if that isn't vendor lock in I don't know what is.
Absolutely correct. You don't know what vendor lockin is.
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Re:Business as usual (Score:5, Insightful)
You make it sound like it is just two companies fighting it out in the market place, with Google being evil because they have the dominant position in search. Nothing could be farther from the truth!
Microsoft already dominates the desktop where they enjoy a monopoly. They got there using Machiavellian business tactics and and in fact were convicted in the USA for monopoly practises. They have been fined in Europe for the same kind of thing. They are the last company we want to see gaining a strong position on the internet. We have seen what they would do once they get such a position. People are still curing about non-standards compliant IE6. The sad thing is they will get there eventually unless we discourage them by avoiding things like Bing and Silverlight. The fact is that they have made Bing the default search in IE8, and ensured that it is not easy to switch to Google. They have included Silverlight in Windows Updates - at least on Windows 7. They have a package called "Windows Essentials" on this platform as well that installs all these things, plus a tie-in to Messenger and MSN. Make no mistake who the enemy is here - it is Microsoft by a mile. Now, you may have reasons to be concerned about Google's strength in search, but promoting Microsoft is not the answer.
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Re:Business as usual (Score:4, Interesting)
Until you lose your internet connection..
I don't think the consumer will lose here. Ads are easily blocked these days. Any competition is a good thing, although I have serious doubts about Chrome and the 'cloud'. Even more so with all of these data loss reports from various vendors you would never suspect would screw up something that is so seemingly simple: A backup plan.
I also have serious doubts about Chrome as a contender in the OS market. What provisions does Chrome have for no internet connectivity? For instance, what if your a business traveler who spends a lot of time flying, or when your drunk neighbor hits the cable box with this truck and your stuck without internet for a week.
All of that said, I still think competition in web search is a good thing, no matter how you cut it. It will keep Google on it's toes, and that's a good thing.
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Re:Business as usual (Score:4, Funny)
...and he loses her privacy to an advertisement company
I was particularly moved by how the despair of realizing that Google isn't a hippy friend drove the basement nerd to suddenly get a sex change.
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Re:Business as usual (Score:5, Insightful)
I really have to question that. For the longest time, it seems like Microsoft has been in reactionary mode, swinging at whoever was making money with electronics. Sony PS1 was the most popular for a generation and really making them money, Microsoft decides to go into video games as well (before Sony, video games consoles were generally designed/made by companies that only did video games, not electronic giants). Apple came out with the iPod and popularized (not invented) the mp3 player, Microsoft decides to jump in with the Zune. Google became the king of search, Microsoft wants a piece of the action with first msn and now bing. They swing at any other megacorp making good money at something.
It isnt to say they aren't going anywhere with it (Xbox seems certainly to have to net them something), but "clean plan" and "understand what they are doing" doesn't come to mind. More like FDR's concept during the great depression to throw a bunch of darts and see what sticks (and besides WW2, those plans weren't really working).
Maybe they cleaned up their directionless act with Windows 7, but that is only one component to their empire. Can't say their whole company has gotten better.
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openness(Google) vs. openness(Microsoft) (Score:5, Insightful)
Megacorps aren't charities.
Which is one reason I love using Free Software only in my computing ventures, I'm nobody's bitch.
If it comes down to the lesser of evils, Google wins by a big margin. If Google challenges Microsoft's OS dominance, the consumer benefits. If Microsoft and NewsCorp succeed in making the Web a collection of walled gardens, the consumer loses out! (Though I say that people will just switch to search aggregators. Heck, you could even run an aggregator as a local proxy! Would make a great GNU project.)
Google may be a "Megacorp," but it's still far less harmful than Microsoft. I say we side with Google and use it to knock Microsoft down a few more pegs.
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Re:openness(Google) vs. openness(Microsoft) (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm no MS fan, but Google scares the crap out of me. MS wants to own your desktop and business systems, Google seems to want to own you.
Every time I look at tech news headlines there is some article about google taking over some data collecting and archiving service in areas ranging from pictures of my house to medical records. Every move I make online seems to be tracked by google somehow, not sure I really want them tracking every move offline as well. Privacy is still important to me, and it seems this idea of tracking everything really didn't come to prevalence until google got involved. IMHO big brother and "do no evil" cannot peacefully coexist.
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Re:openness(Microsoft) vs. openness(Google) (Score:4, Insightful)
How is Chrome OS locked on to Google's products? The products are the webapps, and you can use ChromeOS without ever using Gmail, Google Docs or whatever. Yes, you have to use Chrome (the browser), but in that OS the browser *is* the OS. Chrome OS without Chrome is just the Linux Kernel and few more. Install Firefox/Opera/wtv wouldn't make sense.
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Re:Who marked this guy a troll?? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Corruption? Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations. That's Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel Prize. We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets. Corruption is why we win." Robert Baer / Stephen Gaghan - Syriana
Do you honestly think the lawsuits that make headlines are the only instances of corruption? The only reason Microsoft's unscrupulous business practices make headlines is because they're Microsoft, and not because it isn't standard practice for each and every corporation with over $1M legal budget.
If you want a reason to dislike Microsoft, start by looking at how they employ more lawyers than programmers. But unfortunately it's just more profitable that way. Much more. They have a responsibility to their stockholders to exploit it.
Don't hate the players, hate the game.
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This is how we did it in Naples (Score:4, Funny)
What I'm saying here is that in the end customers won't get hit by competition. It will be bad for the pizza place owners, but there will always be pizzas for everyone. And they will be even more delicious, because the pizza place owners have to fight harder.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
None of this stuff is surprising in any way. You're right that consumers should worry more about monopolies, yet this competition is proof that the monopolies are weaker than ever, which is a win for consumers. Google has been deliberately undermining MS for years for example by supporting firefox in order to wrest the browser market from MS. Once they went public with the Chrome browser, android and the chrome OS it became obvious that Google feels strong enough to go head to head with MS in a far more
Re:This is how we did it in Naples (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect that cheap pizza out-competes good pizza.
This is actually a fairly common thing in Europe too. There's lots of kebab/pizza places that are run by people coming from Turkey or the area around. They directly compete with prices; cheap prices, but also cheap ingredients and somewhat bad service (there are exceptions tho, but in general). Those pizzas aren't that good, you'll find a lot better pizzas in the actual italian like pizza restaurants or the local pizza chain. But many people still use those because it's cheap, even if its just a $2-3 difference.
People are stupid when money comes in to question. Many choose a little bit cheaper, but more crappier thing over a quality product. That will probably happen to computers too, and is most likely already happening.
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Re:This is how we did it in Naples (Score:4, Interesting)
That will probably happen to computers too, and is most likely already happening.
Where have you been for the last 20 years? That is exactly what has been going on. Did you not notice that Microsoft and Intel have become industry giants on the back of crappy clone hardware?
The computing industry is plagued with this problem. For some reason, when it comes to cars or clothes, people understand that sometimes it's better to pay more to get a quality product. But when it comes to computing, it's almost always a race to the bottom, to buy the cheapest junk possible. We even have the situation where people are infecting their own machines with dangerous malware because they are too cheap to buy software.
Things are changing, though. I think this has been the case in the past because people didn't really like computers, or identify with them. They were just necessary evils that one had to buy for work or study. But now that computers are an essential part of daily life, and increasingly status symbols or social identifiers, people are starting to recognize quality in both hardware and software.
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Re:This is how we did it in Naples (Score:4, Informative)
A $1.50 slice in Brooklyn or Queens will generally be better than a $5 slice in some tourist trap or hipster pizza place in Manhattan.
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History lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
Dan 'I'm not a paid shill' Lyons? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you've been following Groklaw over the last few years, I should point out that Mr. Lyons is a huge SCO supporter. I can not say Microsoft pays him money, but anything and everything he says is designed to hit Microsoft's opponents from the side. He likes to say bad things about both Microsoft and Microsoft's opponent of the day, but in a way that Microsoft comes off the better of the two.
I'd put more trust into something John Dvorak had to say than Mr. Lyons.
Agreed. (Score:4, Interesting)
What I took away from this story is this:
"MS is worried about Google, and so they're paying someone to say that Google is just as bad as MS is."
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Even totally not knowing who he is, my first impression from the summary was just in that vein.
"Remember, Google starting the fight with MS (//it is presented a bit like that...) will be only bad for us"
Re:Dan 'I'm not a paid shill' Lyons? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Dan 'I'm not a paid shill' Lyons? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Enough. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about his relationship with Microsoft and don't really care like the above poster does, all I consider is that this person has written a lot of very obvious lies in the past and cannot be trusted as a technical journalist. Using the fake Steve Jobs blogs to push an anti-linux agenda hard was also somewhat unprofessional and ultimately made it obvious as to who was writing it since he was doing SCO pieces at the time as well that overlapped.
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Dan Lyons is a lying sack of shit. Links: (Score:4, Interesting)
Thjis is the guy who did the "Fake Steve Jobs" blog, bitching about Yahoo "lying" about how long Yang was going to be CEO
http://valleywag.gawker.com/5091609/newsweek-reporter-yahoo-pr-lying-sacks-of-s+++ [gawker.com]
Groklaw archive of all the pro-sco fud from Lying Lyns: http://www.groklaw.net/quotes/showperson.phtml?pid=30 [groklaw.net]
The guy is scum. He also has no clue when it comes to the inner workings of technology (sort of like a lot of the "analysts" that you see getting it wrong all the time).
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Re:Dan 'I'm not a paid shill' Lyons? (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed - because everything discussed on Groklaw is backed up with documentation [groklaw.net]. Therefore, if you read Groklaw, you will have followed the links to the Comes vs Microsoft material [groklaw.net] or the links to hundreds of other documents [groklaw.net] sufficient for any thinking person to come to their own, negative conclusions about Microsoft's business conduct.
Now you will also find conspiracy theories in abundance on Groklaw as well, as was pointed out in a comment above yours. It you are looking for entertainment, you may find them amusing, but an independent thinker will not pay much attention to this kind of discussion if he want to be informed. He will go straight to the documentation and make up his or her own mind.
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Loosing faith in competition? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone who thinks that a device will be free underestimates how willing people in 3rd world countries are to build houses out of such devices, or nerds willing to wall paper their rooms with it, well you catch the drift I'm sure :)
On the other hand being able to have a 13" device without running into the fact that that requires a full Vista/Windows7 license (there's restrictions in the xp & cheaper netbook versions that limit them to 11" screens on netbooks) does make them a lot cheaper, but I fail to see how that would hurt the consumer?
Also some competitive pressure on Microsoft/Apple to lift such artificial restrictions that are designed to maximize their profit margins seems like a win for consumers in my book, or did we loose faith in this whole competitive market thing?
The only thing that does slightly worry me is the whole Murdoch / Microsoft assault on the open web, the alternative to robots.txt they propose (which allows partial pages to be indexed without being allowed to read the text around it) would allow spammers to create pages where only a popular search term bit of text would be surrounded by virii, scams and spam. It just won't work and it won't bring back the distribution monopoly's that Murdoch enjoyed for most of his (very long) life.
Competition is bad for consumers (Score:5, Funny)
Normally the reaction to someone saying this kind of pinko commie crap is to laugh and tell them to go fuck themselves back to Russia.
But Lyons has a point. Competition, in this particular case, may not be the best thing for customers. Why so, you may ask. It is because of the lopsidedness of the market that makes this situation so precarious.
From the end of WWII until the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were two sides to every geopolitical debate. The side of good, right, and the American Way and the side of the Soviet Union. Countries aligned themselves along these very clear geopolitical boundaries. Though it was easy enough to declare allegiance to one side or the other, many countries found their own geopolitical aspirations dashed to smithereens on either the broad wings of the American eagle or the hard, solid face of the Iron Curtain.
However, with the end of the Cold War, vassal states are now finding their own voice. Countries that were previously shackled now find that the lack of a superpower competition has resulted in more opportunities for growth. Take two countries that America fought wars in as examples. Korea and Vietnam are now booming with economic and technological growth.
These opportunities don't come because they are subservient states to a particular superpower, but because they no longer need to pledge allegiance and are able to make their own way.
So when two superpowers like Microsoft and Google start duking it out, the fallout is going to hit partner companies AND consumers alike.
An improvement for consumers (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft has always cared far more about crushing competition than providing anything of value to consumers. They buy up cool products just to shut them down, have a massive FUD engine, and promise the next version will be better but instead deliver Windows ME and Vista. Even if Google is just a money-grubbing competitor, it is a real competitor that Microsoft can't crush. Which means both companies will have to compete by offering something better to the consumers. Consumers win.
Re:An improvement for consumers (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, if it is not profitable, why buy the company and shut it down? Just let the company die on its own. And they're not buying them for the technology either, because they don't use it. They buy them and shut them own because they are worried that it will steal market share from them.
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Bollocks! (Score:4, Insightful)
Really. Google has never wanted to damage Microsoft, but they sure want to take every step possible to make sure that they 'play nice'. Yes, I suppose that this could be 'damaging' to MS's usual business methods.
Already Microsoft is swinging deals behind the scenes to better promote their new search engine (ref: Murdoch/MS search exclusions). I say let's get rid of the 'behind the scenes' deals - for both of them.
The author neglected to consider one thing.... (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
Dan "lyin'" Lyons figures out that companies aren't the warm fuzzy things he thought they were.
Dan also figures out that water is wet.
--
BMO
This is Dan Lying Lyons (Score:5, Interesting)
people this is Dan lyons he is the guy who said SCO not only had a case but would win.
I would trust him being right about as much I would trust darl mcbride to be right. once a liar always a liar. Some people can change but the most will not have the strength to.
Besides it is almost anti-gogle for google to push even more ads on people. Google ads are almost always simple text based items that are off to the side. unlike MSFT which brands everything it touches two or three times.
ridiculous argument (Score:4, Insightful)
Google might be an advertisement company and not a search company, but they created and implemented the whole concept of unobtrusive text ads. Remember what the web was like before Google ads (and AdBlock)? You couldn't type in a url without a dozen pop-ups or a punch the monkey game. Can anyone really envision Microsoft or any other advertising company making ads LESS obtrusive if Google hadn't done so first?