
Microsoft Is the New Google, Google Is the Old Microsoft - hashx
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/02/18/microsoft-google-swap/?
======
blinkingled
> Furthermore Google appears to be making another old Microsoft error:
> deprioritizing mobile.

> Just as the evolution of Windows got sluggish once Microsoft had domination
> of the computer space, so Google looks to be resting on its laurels in
> mobile with Android. I’m a huge fan of Android 5.0 Lollipop but in hindsight
> was prioritising ‘Material Design’ (illustrated above) over combating
> performance, battery life and fragmentation issues really a wise move? After
> all Android’s native UI is the first thing most handset makers throw out the
> window.

What? Project Volta focused on Battery Life. They changed the entire runtime
to ART for performance. Material design was a much needed solution to coherent
UI across Google's properties.

Also remember that Google brought us HTTP/2 when Microsoft and Apple were
completely ignoring the web.

GMail is great but they are still bringing Inbox which I find to be a good
step towards better Email management. I understand it might now work well for
everyone but still, they are trying to evolve it.

And they are focusing on moonshot projects while continuing to improve
existing successful products in a meaningful way for exactly the same reason -
not to be complacent. How otherwise do you not rest on your laurels?

The article is a bunch of baloney really.

~~~
wbkang
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...](http://blog.gsmarena.com/benchmarking-
android-5-0-lollipop-battery-life-samsung-galaxy-s5-lg-g3/) Project volta
doesn't mean improved battery life. There are many factors to battery life
that are not addressed by Project Volta.

~~~
jonalmeida
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.

~~~
pmelendez
>"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 reminds me so much to Windows 95 ...

~~~
aceperry
"This reminds me so much to Windows 95 ..."

That statement is so wrong... I switched to linux from Win95 because the
bluescreens sucked so bad. No comparison really.

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

~~~
cowardlydragon
Like buying nokia?

About the only thing I've seen that is remotely interesting is supporting
docker in Azure.

~~~
wlesieutre
Putting .NET Core on Github? Visual Studio free for small teams? Surface Pro?
Office across all platforms, many of them completely free? Giving away Windows
10?

Maybe none of those are things you'd use, but to other people they're a pretty
big deal.

~~~
plnk22
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.

~~~
michael_h
> Nobody builds the next facebook or twitter using MS tools and Windows

Well, then again: [http://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/11/22/what-it-takes-to-
run-s...](http://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/11/22/what-it-takes-to-run-stack-
overflow/)

~~~
timrichard
Yeah, but I'd love to see how long it would function if they took away open
source tools like Redis and HAProxy.

------
Someone1234
Windows 8 was actually a very brave move by Microsoft, and even if looked upon
as a misstep, was really what brought the company to where it is today.

Before Windows 8 we just had years and years of incremental "sameness." Vista
was meant to be a big shake-up but instead that got shelved and we got a very
modest improvement over XP (driver issues and memory consumption not
withstanding), the same with 7, it was a very incremental improvement over
Vista (even if coming from XP directly made it look bigger).

Windows 8 was where the company decided to really try something new. It was
the largest UI shakeup since Windows 95/NT 4.0. And I think that shakeup
helped shake some cobwebs loose because since then Microsoft are continuing to
take bigger (welcome) risks.

Even just looking at the Windows 10 technical preview feedback program should
tell you this is a new Microsoft. In previous Windows pre-releases, they would
fix bugs in alpha/beta releases, but never made UI or functionality changes
just based on feedback. They ARE with Windows 10.

If you go look at the feedback Windows 10 has received, several major pieces
have been actioned.

Seems like the company has a fire lit under it again. It is welcome.

~~~
yarrel
It wasn't something new, it was their same tired old strategy of copying Apple
without any understanding of what they were copying and with level after level
of managerial air-brakes on doing anything right.

The user experience of 8 is _hated_ by long-term Windows users. Microsoft have
never been a consumer software company, their customers were OEMs and
corporations. They shouldn't be giving away Windows 10 for free, they should
give Windows 8 users a refund.

Desperation doesn't make a company inspiring or trustworthy.

~~~
eco
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.

~~~
numo16
> What about Windows 8 do you feel is copying Apple?

Well, they made it more touch friendly, so they were obviously copying
Apple... /s

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

I get some of the criticism he has for Google when it comes to their OS
strategy and Google+. But on the other hand, Google is making real progress in
some of the core AI areas, and they are applying it so well to the tons of
data they have.

I've been travelling a lot recently, and I found that Google Maps is towering
head and shoulders above its competitors. Not only does it have a lot more
high quality information (about public transport for instance), it is also
much better at guessing what I mean when I search for something, which is even
more important when you're not sitting behind your desk.

Google Maps feels like it is getting fanatical attention from the people
behind it. They don't seem to be distracted by any moonshots at all. And if
anything, the driverless car has to be an additional boost to their
motivation. I feel that all kinds of projects that apply AI to tons of data
are converging really really well at Google right now.

~~~
emp_zealoth
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

------
icehawk219
In a way I'd argue that Google suffers from the same real underlying issue
that started to cause Microsoft to fall: complacency. They see themselves as a
king of the world that can't be beaten. And in a way they aren't strictly
wrong right now. So many people will still jump up and defend and support
everything Google for no reason other then "because Google!". But that's also
starting to change. In my opinion the best thing that could happen to Google
right now would be for them to take a market share hit.

~~~
suvelx
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.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "I don't know of a single Google product that I use that has a reasonable
alternative."

They might not cover all of your personal needs but for most people:

\- iOS is as good as or better than Android

\- Office is better than Google Docs

\- Gmail is still the best web mail but Google mobile/desktop clients are no
where near as good as the alternatives

\- I find Safari 8 (on Mac) much faster, more efficient, and pleasant to use
than Chrome. Firefox is close to Chrome but there are still a few (little)
things with it that annoy me.

~~~
wil421
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.

~~~
k-mcgrady
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.

------
hipsterrific
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.

~~~
cloudwalking
Would you argue that Glass did not move the market, regardless of its success?

~~~
tashoecraft
It may have moved the market backwards in terms of public image.

------
bsdpython
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.

------
aburan28
Google does not fulfill quarterly numbers and now they are doomed? They have
$100 billion in cash and are in a position to expand into so many other
markets and spends 15% of their top line revenue on R&D. Meanwhile Apple is
attempting to build a car from scratch?

~~~
adventured
$64.4 billion in cash as of the latest quarter.

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

~~~
pconner
Clickbait is the new journalism

~~~
tsax
Not just clickbait either. The whole article is a mish-mash of bad tech
history analogies.

~~~
EugeneOZ
Thank you guys, I thought the whole world goes crazy if such a crappy set of
"tech words" as this article can be upvoted to 250+ on HN.

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

~~~
cowardlydragon
A free compiler and dev tools? Revolutionary.

Or, completely the norm in Ruby, Python, Java... um, every other language.

Did they OSS the IDE?

~~~
jdmichal
You mean the Java for which the reference VM (Hotspot) and compiler were not
open-sourced until November 13, 2006 [1], roughly corresponding with the Java
6 release?

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#Sun.27s_promise_and_ini...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#Sun.27s_promise_and_initial_release)

------
dlu
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

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

------
ocdtrekkie
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.

------
aikah
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.

~~~
cssmoo
Some of us are quite happy to pay for it.

And yes we did get an audit and had to fork out a couple of average
developers' salaries but to be honest we're fucking rolling in cash thanks to
them, so meh. Time to market is stupid low - we can have stuff up on Azure and
making cash before the Java guys have started Eclipse and the python guys have
provisioned their virtual envs and written their first wsgi handler.

(for ref, we do run some Linux kit on Azure but it's memcached and ops stuff)

~~~
minthd
What tools are you using to gain such advantage?

~~~
cssmoo
Azure PaaS and VS. Azure allows us to sidestep a lot of iteration 0 and devops
stuff and just hit the metal. VS is just pretty good at what it does.

~~~
selimthegrim
How are those reboots upon Azure host OS updates working out for you?

~~~
cssmoo
Fine. You do know about availability sets right?

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.

------
aceperry
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.

------
plnk22
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.

~~~
scholia
Google Search vs Alta Vista, Gmail vs Hotmail? Not saying they didn't
innovate, but not much comes out of a clear blue sky.... Buzz and Wave didn't
get Google very far.

~~~
takluyver
I don't understand why we're so keen to criticise tech companies for copying
one another. Companies doing similar things are competing, and we generally
consider that a good thing.

And sometimes a copy with some difference can be a lot better. Google+ hasn't
taken off, but it wasn't ridiculous to think that grouping your contacts in
circles for separate discussions could have been a significant improvement in
social networking, like grouping emails into conversations was for webmail.

~~~
scholia
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.

------
ejz
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.

------
gitdude
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

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

------
superbaconman
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.

~~~
nvivo
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.

~~~
cowardlydragon
dotNET is an MS only platform.

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.

So sure, it's better than C++.

~~~
tsomctl

      dotNET is a MS only platform.
    

These people would like to disagree:
[https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr](https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr)
[https://github.com/ajensenwaud/coreclr](https://github.com/ajensenwaud/coreclr)
[http://www.mono-project.com/](http://www.mono-project.com/)

And does Java support unsigned integers yet?

~~~
pconner
Are there any major projects built using mono?

~~~
bcj
Unity is:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_%28game_engine%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_%28game_engine%29)

~~~
nacs
Unity has been using an old version of .Net for licensing reasons.

Also, about a year or so ago, they started porting to an LLVM-based solution
and Unity 5+ is expected to be discontinue the Mono runtime.

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

------
yarrel
No, Microsoft are the new Lotus.

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

------
Steko
Take a drink if this article critical of Google is at a lower rank than we
would expect. Currently:

Rank 11 129 pts, 2 hours ago

vs

Rank 5 115 pts, 5 hours ago

