Google is going to build a Hailstorm++ ?

Mark Lucovsky left Microsoft today. Now, Mark is a legend, so I don't think he needs further introduction. What interested me was that he left to work for Google. Looking back at what Mark has done, you'll see things like 'Designing NT kernel', 'Designing in-house sourcecontrol system for win2k' etc. Not your average notepad-style projects.

What made him move to Google, a company who competes with Microsoft but in a complete different area? For that, you have to look at what Mark also was: designer at the Hailstorm team. Now, let's enter speculation mode. What if Google hired Mark to architect the all-you'll-ever-need-website/services system for Google, which combines all Google's current and future services? Strange thought? Perhaps, but let's look closer at what he has to say in his brilliant posting about shipping software. He tries to explain that Microsoft is not that good at shipping software. Some people in the blog community read in those words that Microsoft wasn't able to create CD's.

NO, silly!

What Mark meant was that the way software is shipped, by installing it on the client through CD's, DVD's or a cumbersome download process, is slow and the number of clients affected is not controlled by you and it will take some time before all clients have installed your software. That's not MS fault, it's the disadvantage of the way their software usually is distributed. However, with an online service website, a new feature is distributed to all users in one go. He gives that example.

You still think he'll work on some OS? Think again. Oh, and while you're firestarting your braincells, please think about what kind of impact this will have for how we use computers.

5 Comments

  • I think it has a broader scope than CD's and DVD's... I think it also includes how software is installed from websites like windowsupdate. Even though they've simplified the process, you still have to go through some process in order to update your computer. Plus, there are reboots involved, which are expensive as far as user experience goes.



    I believe that his point was that online services such as Google and Amazon have the ability to make quick changes to their products because the user just has a simple UI wrapper on their box. The core product is hosted outside of the user's reach/experience.



    For example, I was using Google Desktop and heard that there was a security bug. So, I went to see if I was vulnerable and what do you know... the software had auto-updated itself without any interaction from me. Now, if I were a novice computer user, I wouldn't have even noticed that.



    The flip side of this argument is that you don't want to automatically push updates to the consumer and end up breaking their computers.

  • Sounds significant Frans. Keep us posted on your thoughts.

  • Frans,



    SOA? Next generation? he expressed very intereting thoughts but MS has more then enough $$$ power to compete with Google ;).



    Maxim



    [www.ipattern.com do you?]

  • I would agree that shipping CDs to people is cumbersome, but since I can automatically download fixes for Windows, in theory MS could ship fixes to me (almost) as fast as Amazon can provide fixes to their own web site. If they can perfect rollbacks & updates w/o requiring reboots, it could get pretty seamless.



    One could argue that a company who updates their own web site is essentially automatically updating it for their consumers & forcing them to go along with the upgrade. Did Amazon previously work on IE4 & now it doesn't? Oops, too bad for you!



    So is the real issue that web sites are simpler or more stable or have a less diverse user base than an OS, & thus have the luxury of being able to slam out fixes more easily? I wonder if the updating web sites vs OSs might be more apples & oranges.

  • Google sickens me. Their motto is "Do no evil", or in other words "don't go the Microsoft route". But in the meantime they build an all-encompassing system in which what hardware or operating system you use is completely irrelevant: everything else will be Google.

    Is this a good idea? No, of course not. I wouldn't trust my private data any more with Google than I do with Microsoft. Hailstorm failed because noone trusted Microsoft to keep private data, well, private. Single sign-on Passport? Failed because people don't trust Microsoft. Hiring Lucovsky, introducing their own SmartTags (but wait! You have to turn it on, so it's not evil!), broadening their market from on-line search engine to service host... I don't like what I'm seeing.



    And please, to all you blinded OS zealots: even though Google uses Open Source, have you ever seen them contribute a single piece of code back? Google is a commercial company with commercial interests. Whatever "evil" stigma applies to Microsoft in your opinion applies to Google the same.

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