Why Won't Apple or MS Give Us What Google Might?
With the announcement late tonight that Google is set to release an operating system, the time has come to ask "Why can't we have it all?"
Everywhere in marketing you see the battle between Apple's OS X and its truly high-functioning stable of software offerings, vs. Microsoft's less-reliable OS on cheaper, but more robust hardware offerings (except the Power Mac); but yet nearly everyone I know really relies upon Google's offerings of GMail and Docs, Apps and Search to actually utilize information in a clean and "cloud" manner. When you look at the entrepreneurial community, hands-down Google rules because its stable is cheap, very functional, and highly-reliable.
The problems come, of course, when you look at other needs than simple computing, right? Ahem, maybe not...and Google seems poised to prove it. If they have really figured a way to close the gap between OS X and Windows 7 by presenting a wholly-integrated offering for desktop-to-cloud; well, both Apple and MS have a serious problem on their hands. Even Canonical, with their ambitious Ubuntu, has yet to really bridge this gap. However, Google has the advantage of the most massive data analysis and most seriously challenging (i.e. revolutionary) business model on the planet--enough so that they literally may have the ability to know exactly what we want, as we want it, and be able to deliver it the way we need it.
So far, Microsoft and Apple have focused so specifically on their past models of hardware and software that they seem to have taken the Goog for granted. Except, that is, in the way both companies have been playing catch-up in online-to-offline integration of their services. Both of the others talk a good game...but have you ever had to wait for iTunes to fully do its business, or for Outlook to catch up to your work? Its torture. I doubt anyone in Google even has the patience to accept the kind of black holes in time and space that both Apple and Microsoft seem to lay upon us as users as "necessary overhead" in their functionality.
No, not this time. If Google is taking their Apps, Docs, Gears, Talk, Gmail, and God knows what else out of "beta" it probably means the Borg (or the Goog, if you will) is coming to take over the world. Or, more specifically, the Goog is coming to take over our desktops and literally blow each of the other three major OS offerings out of the water. It isn't to say they won't have any problems...Chrome does crash now and then. That said, Windows 7 crashes way too often, and when OS X crashes, it takes a heck of a long time for it to heal; and you're not guaranteed to have your data intact when it finally comes back. Lastly, have you tried to recover files in ANY flavor of Linux? (If you can figure out how to do that, without an MIS degree.)
The idea that Apple, MS, and Canonical/Ubuntu have allowed Google to get this far without serious improvements in their own respective fights for our desktop is laughable. When you consider the kind of horsepower it takes under the hood to run either an Apple or an MS product without speed issues, and compare it to Ubuntu or Chrome, the difference is stunning. When you figure that Ubuntu should have been way more evolved by now, Linux should have grown up and spawned a better way to line up its functionality and quality with the prior mentions, stunning becomes embarrassing. As many strides have been made in interoperability, none are even close to a Google product.
Only one company right now really is proving that interoperability can come from a browser or cloud, and it is proving it by doing it every second of every day, and has been for more than 10 years since we first saw the pretty colored logo. Whether that translates into a real OS that real people can use without a robust Internet connection, we'll just have to see. If they succeed, the idea of a paid OS could be gone forever. It may come down to the business models that matter from here on out, and that's exactly how Googlenomics has taken over much of what the untrained eye sees in advertising, content production and distribution, data analysis, economic modeling, game theory, software-as-a-service, and yes...day-to-day word processing, email, chat, and soon phoning home.
Will Google finally break the OS/cloud barrier and just give us what we want? What do we want? I'm betting Google knows better than the other players in the market. However, I'm not about to give up my Skype or iTunes just because Google says so.
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Because Google's OS is based upon open source software. Apple and MS are proprietary.
What a _laugh_ of an "article." To call this any form of journalism is doing it a favor. My FIRST thought was, "How much is Google paying this guy?" My second, "What kind of silly friends does he have that trust their vital data to a megalithic giant like Google - AND - the network - AND trust that there will always _be_ a network up 24/7, 365.24?"
...The more I read, the more I realized this guy Scott just doesn't have a single clue - he's just a user who has no clue how these things actually work - what it takes.
Well, I have written an entire real-time, multi-tasking operating system, from scratch, (by myself) for the purpose of real-time hardware control in the ship, pipeline, and refinery control business. My code included all the device drivers, file system, network drivers, communications protocol ("stack" as some people call it), etc. (My code is good enough to have been in service for 26 years now without a single known bug.) Not only that, but I've written device drivers for other operating systems, have done crash dump analysis - all of this professionally, mind you - even have picked through the individual disk blocks on a disk to reconstruct a damaged file system to recover otherwise lost data.
The author of this article? Not qualified to do much more than log-in, if you ask me.
(end part 1)
(continuation)
Writing an operating system is _hard,_ especially when you have to have it work with so many pieces of hardware that nobody ever planned specifically to go together. Even if you did it all perfectly, it's so much work, there are very _very_ few things of similar complexity known to the world of human-made technology, and one single flaw, anywhere, can make it completely stop working.
This article shows zero understanding or respect for the reality of the situation. Scott should sign up to help a Linux project. I'm sure he's not presently qualified to setup and perform a build of _anything_ but maybe he can learn - and _should_ do if he's going to keep pontificating about operating systems.
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Congrats... I have never written more than a simple executive for a single chip micro and even that is hard (but then, I am a hardware person... when I need RELIABLE concurrency, I break out the FPGA design software and implement the mission critical pieces in hardware...thus avoiding the truly hard part of OS development completely).
I don't think most people ever get to see what kind of engines are running under their hood of their computers. They just can't appreciate the half century of intellectual effort that went into making reliable operating systems...
Interesting attack on MS, most of my clients and myself have been very happy with Window XP Pro.
I myself am leary of Google's intentions and all this cloud technology hoopla has big brother written all over it.
Who in God's name would trust their data and personal information to a monolith like Google?
I booted to a USB key to recover my Ubuntu desktop just a few day ago after I made a stupid mistake that messed thing up. I did not waste time to recover the install I just backup all my data on an external partition than I nuked my install. I formated the partition and use the opportunity to upgrade to ext4. Total downtime if we count a few extra settings and setup about an hour.
That's a VERY good quicky about why Linux is a great technology. I just wish the support was there from a professional applications standpoint. Unfortunately I've been let down by Ubuntu on a few occasions on media-related stuff. Maybe its time to take another look!
Thanks!
Scott
I am a M$ user for 20+ years or so. I have NEVER gotten support from M$. Not once.
The quality of M$ support pages is no better than that of Linux. In the Linux community you usually get a dozen different workarounds for a problem, if not an outright fix. M$ support basically says "We acknowledge that there is a problem. We might fix it in the next service pack. Or we might not. Go away!"
In any case... as a professional Linux user you can always look at the source code and fix it... try that with M$.
:-)
"I just wish the support was there from a professional applications standpoint."
That is just bogus.
Go to www.redhat.com or www.novell.com and buy a Linux support contract.
You'll get FAR better service than your will ever get from Microsoft.
As usual, it seems that most people overlook a very important difference between the so-called OS competition. Ubuntu is a a free, community based operating system created with the idea that the Internet should be for everyone and not just a vehicle for greed driven corporations.
http://www.ubuntu.com/
Great dialogue...for once...is that not what 'this' was created for? Have a good night guys! Ciao!
I work with 4200 employees, 2 data centers. Cisco Nexus 7Ks down to 2621 routers.
Hundreds and hundreds of terabytes of EMC/IBM storage. Citrix farms, SQL clusters,
10 Gb inks, ...
The day Google gives me the ability to stop paying for the crap in our data centers (and those 24x7 employees) will be the day I marry Mr. Brin. may take a while to get it through management ... but they don't care NOW whats in those rooms. They don't care if it is TCP or PCP or LTO or DLT, RAID 5 vs RAID 10 ... get real.
Save them $2 million a year ... that they care about. Drop 20 employees .. thats 1.2 Mill a year savings. Oh, and now those data centers can actually do something other than suck electricity - they could hold employees or crap we make instead of green blinky boxes.
If you think anyone is going to rescue you from your problems, you are mistaken.
What you really need to do is take a chainsaw to the processes that led your company to push out its data center in such an extreme manner.
Even within your organization. What you do is make the data center a cost center. Make them charge the other departments for their service. If the departments balk at the cost, tell them to consider outsourcing or even taking it on themselves. This will really put a chill into the IT department and get them to clean up their act. Or maybe the departments will reconsider their lavish grandiose plans and implement something more efficient. The basic idea is to make people brutally aware of the data center costs by shoving them down their throats.
There are many Fortune 500 companies in Google's corner for this very reason. But it is still very very early. Trusting a company's data to the cloud still is too risky. But it's starting to look like it's only a matter of time. Microsoft will be in steady decline. Apple is more like what Sony used to be. They will continue their innovation in consumer electronics.
why bother?
Why bother? Why bother challenging MS? Animal spirits! It's what drives innovation and technology in America! What if Hewlett & Packard hadn't bothered? What if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln hadn't bothered?
Someone's got to stop the evil empire from making bulky, bloated, crashware!
Hey commenters! Thanks for taking the time to give your reactions to the post. A specific response:
1. In my experiences I have used all of the products, OS's, and platforms mentioned; and have experimented with many variations of Linux that I didn't mention in the piece. Right now I hover between Ubuntu, Windows 7 Ultimate (RC), and a version of Linux called 64Studio, which is customized for Audio applications. I have owned a PowerBook 17 inch in the past, but currently do not own one, and therefore under OSX Snow Leopard I have not yet had a full user experience. My HW ranges from beige box (hand-built) to an older Sony Vaio and a new HP Netbook .
2. My reaction to the official announcement of what Chrome OS might become still is a "wait to see" compared to the other systems, and I think I've tried to convey that ALL of these OS's should be more reliable and user-friendly, but highly functional--lots of good and bad experiences under different conditions. I enjoy the experience of learning and trying to follow each as it progresses, but I'm by no means an on-the-bleeding-edge technologist.
3. I agree that data security is paramount, and I do have several issues with the amount of data that is placed in the cloud.
All the other criticism of the piece, as always I WELCOME.
--
Scott Foval
www.scottsbigmouth.com
www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-foval
scott@foval.com Email/IM
I believe the more knowledgeable users here have been criticizing that you don't seem to know what it is that you are using, not so much that you are not using the products you are talking about.
User experience is like driving a car. Computer science, OTOH, is more like being an automotive engineer. Big difference. So you know how to drive a Porsche and an F-150. Great. What you do not seem to know is how to build, either. Or what the differences under the hood are.
Chrome OS, by Google's own description, is essentially YALINUX (yet another Linux). It's not even Android, which was also a YALINUX, so essentially they are saying that they have painted themselves into a corner with Android and need to start over or it's just NIH (not invented here) syndrome playing out between the Android and the Chrome developer groups.
The cloud computing feature us useless for all but the most amateurish users. I do not want my work files to be on Google's server. No business can let their files be on any server but their own.
Admittedly, that's where the internet advertising revenue is: with the 90% of the most amateurish of users. And that's fine. But let's not mistake advertising companies for serious service providers. Google is the former... my in-house IT admin the latter. Google only works for Google, my IT admin, OTOH, works for me.
Hey Kill...I'm pleased you took the time to point out that you don't think I know what I'm talking about...like you do on other things I write.
As far as the need to demonstrate your own knowledge in a vacuum of not knowing what mine is or is not--you demonstrate your arrogance to me once again. You really haven't done your research on me if you're going to be throwing personal or professional bricks here.
There is a reason I'm a "writer, host, and producer," and do not claim to be a computer scientist. However, having a business-based opinion with a depth of knowledge does not require qualification based on your criteria. That's what engineers are for in enterprises and technology organizations. I'm not one, and don't need to be in order to have an opinion.
As for experience...20 years in technology and strategy, as a consultant and entrepreneur who actually takes the time and has spent most of my life learning the ins and outs of how things work, or don't. If you're going to be insulting, I'm just not going to answer you anymore.
Get a life.
"64Studio"
Wow. That says a lot about your love of working with PCs. I custom-built my DAWs for a while, then I realized I liked making and recording music more than I do hunting down bad drivers and re-installing from Ghost every time a new suite of plug-ins spammed my OS. That's why I switched to OSX. Could I get the same performance from a PC? Sure. But I don't feel like investing the extra time with Widows and none of my favorite software works under Linux (ableton, NI, UAD, waves).
That being said...
One of the big problems I have with the MSM in the political realm is the sense of "false balance". All arguments are given equal weight in order to draw the largest possible demographic, even if one of those arguments is demonstrably false. Forgive me, but I feel some of your statements about OSX fall into that realm. Are there valid criticisms of OSX? Sure. But "OS X crashes, it takes a heck of a long time for it to heal" isn't one of them. The last time I saw the GSOD, I was back and running in minutes (re-boot+the 2 seconds it took to trash the prefs from the app I was using).
So, overpriced systems? I'll entertain that. Draconian upgrade structure? Why not. But "long post-crash recovery time"? Not seeing it, I'm afraid.
Thanks.
Jay
Hey Jay...thanks for your comments. Actually I don't have a love of working with PCs. I've just got a lot of experience working with them due to clients' needs. Not all of the people I work with can afford a suite full of Macs. Accordingly there are some products that I prefer to work with over a Mac. As of right now, indeed I am entertaining buying a couple new ones to work on my online show (launching this fall...hehe). As you know, most of the creative people we generally have contact with in the media business prefer Macs and the editing software (except a very few Audacity, RadioCube, NCH's products, SAM4, etc.) I like to use are almost all open source anyway--can use them on any of the OS X, MS, Debian, BSD variants.
I'll admit, I have not yet jumped back on the Apple bandwagon, but please do not assume that I'm a MS-lover. I have problems with a some things MS does as a company with their products. RE: 64Studio Linux...they are a VERY reputable group of developers who are some of the most committed audio professionals I have had contact with in the past several years...not spammers.
They focus almost exclusively on professional audio and customizations, not a mainstream, but relied upon fairly heavily by the Linux audio community for real quality development in the recording biz. I encourage you to keep an open mind about them.
Apple has made many advances since the PPC was phased out years ago. You really should get up to date before you make these comments. Your comment about the yet-to-be-released Snow Leopard sounds like you're trying to sound more knowledgeable than you are. Yes, I've read your creds, they're fine, but you really do need to get out more.
"Microsoft's less-reliable OS on cheaper, but more robust hardware offerings (except the Power Mac)"
The Power Mac went the way of the dodo years ago. This indicates that you may be out of touch with Apple's current hardware and software products.
"When you consider the kind of horsepower it takes under the hood to run either an Apple or an MS product without speed issues, and compare it to Ubuntu or Chrome, the difference is stunning."
You may not be aware of this, but Mac OS X is a UNIX-based OS just like Ubuntu and the upcoming Chrome. It has the same reasonable requirements as other UNIX based systems. In fact, you may not realize that both the iPhone and the iPod Touch run the same Mac OS X (but parred down to save storage, and to fit another UI) that is run on Apple's computers.
And one can make a nicely tuned Linux run on a single chip CPU with 256k RAM and 1M Flash... no problem. Of course, that will only be the OS capable of running multithreaded applications... not the windowing system and the GUI widgets library.
The comparison between desktop and embedded OS is really useless. Most people don't seem to understand that 99% of what's running on their computer today is really just the eye-candy and the network layers needed to communicate on the WWW.
Acutally JuraRoad, OSX is a BSD-based distribution...a bit different than pure Unix. Linux also is a derivative as you accurately state.
Regarding the Power Mac label...mislabeling of the architecture on my part. Indeed the Intel architecture is more robust than the old PowerMac architecture. I have have not been directly an owner of a PowerBook or Desktop Mac under the new architecture. I do feel that Apple could be doing more to address the pricing issues with their platforms. They do run a Mercedes type of hardware sales strategy, which is fine. I just have not "invested" in their platform recently.
I don't know what "pure Unix" is supposed to be, but I do know that the Open Group has certified Mac OS X Leopard as conforming to the UNIX 03 Product Standard:
http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3555.htm
which is as UNIX as you can get. Its descent from BSD (and the Mach microkernel) instead of System V (or Linux) isn't really relevant.
(You might also look into the recent set of MacBook price cuts. The current lineup is quite competitive for what you get, and the lack of a sub-$1000 entry shouldn't matter much to the "pro" who was going to spend more than that anyway. Or have I misunderstood your comments on Apple's pricing strategy?)
Does this mean the EU is going to sue Google for releasing an OS bundled with a browser? Because that's what they are suing Microsoft for... and ONLY Microsoft.
The EU is building up a very significant pile of laws which apply only to MS.
The suit was about the claim of M$ that the browser could not be separated from the OS, which was a lie back then (as any 13 year old computer literate kid could demonstrate in about two minute's time) and is a lie now.
But relax... Google does not have an OS that can compete with either Windows or Linux. They don't have a competitive browser, either. If I want a browser that works, I use Firefox.
Sorry pal, you are ten years behind the times. The legislation is being brought by the EU right now. It, like the media player lawsuit, is being backed by losers who can't win in the marketplace, can't win in the courts, so now they are trying to win in the legislature.
It makes no sense to have a operating system come without a media player or a web browser. If you don't like IE, go suffer with Teh Lunix.
Great, more competition in this sense should be better products and better value.
Except that there is no competition here. 99% of the world's top selling (and most useful) applications will not be running on Chrome OS.
Looks like someone is mistaking applications for the operating system. Applications like Chrome can be made to run on any OS that offers standard multitasking, file system and networking services. Same for email clients, word processors etc.. Google makes wonderful little apps. They have yet to make a single full scale killer app, though. And that is still far removed from making a full featured operating system that runs on a wide range of hardware devices. At the moment there are only two of those for the consumer desktop market: Windows and Linux. OS X is simply a Unix derivative with a pretty user interface that runs on exactly two pieces of hardware: Apple desktops and Apple iPhones. That's it.
And while I hate Windows (for many technical reasons and a few aesthetic ones), the notion that it crashes in general is nonsense. I have a Windows 2000 machine at work which I have to reboot at most a couple of times a year... and always for the same reason: poorly written device drivers. I know which drivers cause the crash, the OS itself is rock solid. That, of course is not true for Vista and future versions of Windows, but in the past M$ managed to put out some decent, if ugly, products.
You seem to be mistaking Google Chrome the web browser with Google Chrome, the OS that they just announced they will be working on.
I just read Google's own page on it, again. And by their own description Google Chrome OS is Linux, topped off with a custom windowing library and a special set of widgets for Chrome, the Web browser.
You are free to explain to me how that's a new OS to begin with... in my books it's merely a fork of Linux and yet another window system (of which you can find dozens, if not hundreds out there, already).
My point was that Google is NOT developing a new OS. They are developing a better environment for an app that happens to be a web browser which can call other apps running on servers. The windowing system is already an app... it just happens to be an app that runs other apps and that communicates with those apps through different mechanisms (function calls, message queues, you name it... you could use paint balls fired at mechanical switches connected to general purpose IO ports and the theoretical divide between OS and app would not change by a iota).
My feeling is that there are some threading and networking issues that stop them from having high enough performance with Chrome on existing OS network layers and within the X-Window environment. Who can blame them... haven't we all been there at one time or another with a networked graphical app? I have been... I just didn't have the resources and/or the chutzpa to call it my "own" OS...
This sounds like a bunch of technical words strung together with no meaning and no clear understanding of the topic.
Amazing question - when will MS or Apple give us something Google *might* (that is, hasn't yet) give us? Well, when will Google give us something Apple might one day give us?
Chrome OS is not a promise of curing computer woes we experience on Windows or Mac or Linux. It's a stripping-down of computing to revolve around tasks most users spend most of their time on, i.e. web-based tasks. It's targeted towards netbooks, which again is a narrowing of the computer to a niche that Internet apps fill. The gains from this are faster start-ups, and I suppose potentially better reliability due to less complexity (if everything is a web app and the desktop is mostly a browser engine and renderer).
(and recovering a file on Linux? You mean like (on any major distro with KDE or Gnome) taking it out of the trash can, like on Windows or Mac? Or using one of a variety of recovery tools that don't require the command line?)
Linux blows Microsoft out of the water hands down.
The only barrier for Linux is that most people use Microsoft on the desktop. And so companies write apps for Microsoft and not Linux.
Also apparently Best Buy is paid or coerced to not offer Linux on the computers they sell.
It would be interesting if Best Buy offered a Microsoft computer and then the very same hardware with Linux, but without the Microsoft tax.
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