“Living In The Google World” – The real answer for Microsoft

An article by Garett Rogers in his “Googling Google” blog on ZDNet inspired a response that I thought fit right into this “Living In The Google World Series”.

In his blog, Garett gives the suggest to Microsoft to partner with Google on their search results while secretly building their own new search engine.

That doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t address the real issue…Microsoft’s mindset.

Having lived most of their corporate lives with the growth of desktop computing, that’s the world they live in. Add to it that the company makes most of it’s revenues from OS’s and desktop apps and you can see how easily they can be stuck in the older “desktop world”.

I see one simple answer on how they can fix this:

Microsoft needs to form a division that lives, breathes, eats and sleeps only on the web.

This group needs to eschew any sort of desktop app, use only web apps and mobile devices. 

Doing so will clearly put them into the experience of what today’s advanced users and tomorrows regular users need and want. I think it will also put them into the experience that their competition (Google) is living every day.

It’s going to be annoying to them for a while, but they can start by using Chrome and the Google App suite in order to learn it inside and out. This will help knock them even further out of their “Microsoft dominate the world with desktop software 1990’s” mindset. 

The knowledge and experience Microsoft gains from this division will make it easy for then to know what to build. From there, they can put their muscle and $ behind building it.

As I mentioned, the nature of their company right now is that their revenues come from the OS and from their apps.

That’s the revenue that makes their company work, so they are compelled to “adapt” that software to work with the new paradigm with mediocre results. 

Better to start with a new “class” of thinking and get back into the game before their boat anchor OS’s and desktop apps pull them down any further.

There’s the answer. Easy to say, harder to do. Still, I bet Microsoft could easily do it if they just get out of their own way.

You can read all of Garett’s story here.

Chrome Browser Team Did Not Disassemble Microsoft Vista

“Seriously…we didn’t disassemble Vista….”

In his special report for ZDNet, Stephen Shankland, writes that even though comments in Chromium (open source code for Chrome) indicate otherwise, Google denies disassembling Window’s Vista to get the “Data Execution Prevention” security code to work in Chrome.

That’s good news for Google, because had they indeed followed their own suggestion to disassemble Vista’s kernal32.dll file to understand how the security code works, they would have been in violation of Vista’s EULA.

Google says “We did not disassemble this code” in one statement, but then shows their support for using the technique saying “Disassembling is a common and accepted practice in software development, frequently used to make sure software features are compatible with other software programs or operating systems”.

To me it sounds like someone did disassemble the code and put the comment in Chromium before the Google legal and PR team knew it.

The net result is “who cares”. I doubt there was evil intent behind it and besides, I’m guessing Microsoft has probably done the same once or twice in it’s 30 year history. I bet the same goes for Mozilla developers too.

To see Stephen Shankland’s full report, go here.

Chrome for Mac next, Sorry Linux; Plus New Developer Tools

Speaking at Web 2.0 Expo, Google’s Ojan Vafai talked about Chrome coming to the Mac before Linux due to size of each market.

Maybe more interesting to the non-Mac users were Ojan’s comments about “soon to come” Chrome developer tools to make it easier to develop in Javascript.

Perhaps there will be a set of standard Chrome libraries to handle all the Javascript necessary for UI elements like dialog boxes and toolbars.

When a platform has great development tools that make developer’s lives easier, more time can be spent on creating new features.

Way to go Google!

More detail on Ojan’s talk from Larry Dignan at ZDNet here.

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