Relax, Bill Gates; it's Google's turn as villain

Many in Silicon Valley are skittish about Google's size and power, and fret that its strengths are transforming it into a threat.
The New York Times

The story "Relax, Bill Gates; it's Google's turn as villain" published August 24, 2005 at 6:06 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

Content from The New York Times expires after 7 days.

[iqula]

Googles MS silver arrow

Googles best bet to combat MS would be to move the desktop including office onto the web leaving the average home PC as a media data storage and playing hub.

This will create the user stickieness that they are dying to acheive. See <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.cosmopod.com" target="_newWindow">http://www.cosmopod.com</a> for an example of a free personal online desktop.

Thanks for the advertisement

But if I want to respond to ads, I'll click on the ones that are paying
Cnet for the space.

[Mendz]

Clients/devices will be thinner in the future...

So, yes, rich applications using web services will be the direction. The device OS will still be there to boot. And most things on it will be online.

Sorry, but I don't think one web site will be the "desktop of the future".

[Scott W]

competition

in the end i hope that the competition will force the best products. well, the best products will always be in the OSS domain but maybe MS and google will produce products worthy of second-best ;)

[adsaero]

Attitude

I do have concerns over anybody who's motto is "do no evil" losing sight of that motto as they grow larger. The original founders of the company may indeed have had that perspective, but as you hire more and more talent into a company that just keeps getting bigger and bigger, it's harder to keep a reign on those employees as they're set to task doing their own projects without enough supervision and management.

I've worked on a couple of projects with Google, and I'm surprised at their "our way or the highway" attitude.

Competition is good. But two superpowers who trample all over the little guy are twice as bad as one.

[aabcdefghij987654321]

Oh please, Google is far from evil....so far...

&lt;quote lifted from petervl@***.com from a GroupWise list ([e-mail]), but fits here so well&gt;

google could become evil. but there are lots of search engines. and lot's of other companies that do most of the stuff google does. niether you nor anyone else is forced to use google anything.

I choose to use google tools because:

they are not ms
they work, and well (for the most part)
the company plays well in the oss space

At some point, they could become evil (in fact it would not surprise me at all if they do) but as of yet, they just mostly rock.

MS -- is evil in that they have supressed innovation and destroyed whole markets of software and are conscious of these efforts. The abuse of monopoly power across domains (ie desktop and productivity suite and NOS) and their willingness to subvert competition not only through illegal exclusivity demands with OEM's and other partners but also through simple techy ******** like breaking novell clients with windows patches (probably has not happened in quite awhile, but I am convinced it did happen) is truly evil.

[mousky]

Potentially Evil

It seems that you no longer actually have to do evil things, rather there has to be a potential to do evil to be labelled as evil. The anti-googlians gripe about the amount of information that Google "collects" yet, no a single person has proof that Google has used this information in some way that violates their privacy policy. But because Google collects this information they are labelled as evil by some.

Not quite true

Google is evil in the respects that it's cookies don't expire until 2038, and it continues to use cookies with unique ID's to track people's preferences (and could be used to track people in general) when cookies aren't even required at all to track preferrences. Google is a privacy time bomb waiting to explode.

2038?!

But, that's 5 years after we nuke the planet to death! ***?!

Interesting spin..

Don't you just hear the collective whine coming from these "others" in "silcon valley". Let's complain that some company is actually innovating and hiring the best of the best. This is just sour grapes, that this Google can transform and deliver so fast to a market that is constantly changing. I really feel that Google is itself a new business model in terms of revenue stream and product deliver (to consumer)

[Christopher Hall]

It's the NYT, what did you expect?

Expect nothing less than spin from the New York Times.

[Jan Modaal]

Re: Interesting spin..

There were search engines before Google and there are less spam and adult saturated than Google's index available today as well.

Google didn't invent webmail, they just made a copycat and slapped a limit on it that made tech geeks cream their pants.
Google's usenet archiving is unique but they acquired that from Deja, it's nothing they built.
Street maps, news aggregators, messengers, blog hosts, picture searching, toolbars, desktop searching, etc none of those things were new or unheard of.

Whether your banner says Microsoft, Apple, Google or OSS taking something that already exists and slapping a few new features on it doesn't make you innovative. Someone else built the house and they're just decorating it.

[Llib Setag]

C/NOT Sugar Daddy Spinmeisters

Since Google has a "no comment to C/Net policy" &#38; Citizen
Gates is their "sugar daddy", it is no surprise that an article like
this one where Google is "Evil" &#38; Citizen Gates Microsith is
"Good" spin is posted on C/NOT's Front Page.

The main reason for this is that their Redmond "sugar daddy" is
the one that is "irked the most" by Google's competitive &#38;
expanding nature recently, &#38; everybody knows that illegal
monopolies despise all forms of "competition &#38; innovation".

Typical C/NOT National Enquirer "tech-news" article with
sensational headlines &#38; political spins.

RTFA

You did notice the article is from the New York Times, right?

[Andrew J Glina]

Llib is at it again

Step One: Read Story
Step Two: Think
Step Three: Make comment based on facts in article

Try it one time. If you have read Googles Privacy Policy you might change your mind about them. Furthermore, they are already doing many things that I consider as evil, including bundling their toolbar with other software and having the "install" option as default. Evil.