Microsoft versus Google

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Putting the cart before the OS

MICROSOFT’S obituary has been written many times, but this trend reached fever pitch last week when Google announced it was going to compete head-to-head with the world’s largest software maker by producing its own operating system.
 
The article is trying to bury Chrome OS before it has even started development. I would like to see where they go with it. It is not too difficult to conceive of a future in which 100% of all computing occurs within your browser. Anything with the promise to replace the M$ "genuine disadvantage" deserves our support.

But the most important, if not exactly thrilling, news of last week was that VLC released version 1.0 of its excellent video player (www.videolan.org). Anyone who has struggled to play a video file knows VLC just works, no matter what. If only all software was this reliable.
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VLC has always been my player of choice. Seldom ever fails. So I was delighted to download version 1.0 a few days ago. Damn it, but the bloody thing keeps freezing up, and I have to task manager it away. :confused:
 
What you’re seeing is a sophisticated game of one-upmanship between the two biggest gorillas in the room: Microsoft and Google.
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Hehe. I read an article a few years back about google. Their main selling point at that time was that they didn't package things together (example FF was a different product that they supported). These days, I don't perceive them doing anything radically different from Microsoft. They are releasing their own products and selling their own products through their own products. For example, I wonder which browser the Chrome OS will run. There is a difference though, Google makes it available for free while Microsoft does not. This makes me wonder about something else, if the roles were turned around, and Google had 95% market share, would the EU hit them with the anti-trust issues (or something similar)?
 
But the most important, if not exactly thrilling, news of last week was that VLC released version 1.0 of its excellent video player (www.videolan.org). Anyone who has struggled to play a video file knows VLC just works, no matter what. If only all software was this reliable.
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I object.

I had 3 BSOD's on my laptop while using VLC, and even when using VLC I miss the simple interface of GOM player.

It also just 'works', and it does it even on otherwise broken AVI files that even VLC refuses to play.

I thought... oh it's V1 now, perhaps it actually improved, but not, it's still the same combination of components as it's been for ages, and unstable as heck.

...

Anyway - way to go off-topic in a single news article ;)

...

Chrome OS will soon enough meld into Android. It might actually satisfy some user's needs, which is great, but how well will it handle hardware issues? Will it for you to use just a certain set of hardware, or will it support a myriad of devices like Windows and Linux does?

And if you want to go beyond the safe zone?

I'm glad I was thrown into the deep end of the pool in the DOS days...
 
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inferno said:
Why would I use Chrome OS when I can use windows 7?
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very good point, i have been using windoze7 rc2 for a while now at work and it's stable, would still love to see what chrome OS looks like
 
From MS vs Google then suddenly out of the blue, VLC? WTF? And yet... it's more complelling to state which media player i use than to talk about 7 vs Chrome... so:

I use media player classic - I've always been for simple software, hate the whole "library, organiser, sidepanel with the cd cover" thing. And I use AIMP2* for my music needs, reminds me of winamp before it started to suck (AKA winamp 3 onwards).


* My random advertising for free software that "just works"
 
VLC rlues. If you have installed crappy games and direct-x anything you deserve everything you get. mwhahahaha.
 
inferno said:
Why would I use Chrome OS when I can use windows 7?
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Why drink beer when you can drink water?

LOl... what a funny question you asked.

Also, I think if you had read the article you would have noticed that Chrome OS is for netbooks, something Microsoft products are pretty weak at.
 
theJonster said:
If you had read the article you would have seen that Microsoft has made windows 7 to run on netbooks :D
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I know it does and I read the article.. but Windows 7 like a lame dog with herpes on a netbook. XP also runs on netbooks but its crap as well. Hence my comment. Why the fk would you use an crap OS on your netbook that slows it down just so you can see the color blue?
 
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inferno said:
Why would I use Chrome OS when I can use windows 7?
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Because you have to pay for it.

It's usually riddled with security flaws. Just take the last 3 months and check how many security updates you had to do.

And it's not open source. Most of it's security flaws was made public by the leakage of the source code for Windows 2000.

Making things pretty isn't what I'm after really. But having said that, MS has a really tough job competing with Google ahead. MS has always been good at marketing (that's why they crushed OS's like OS/2 Warp which was much better than Win 3.11)

And because they got their foothold into the community since personal computers got affordable to gen-pop, it will be very hard convincing people otherwise.

<Insert Google>

Everyone knows them. It will be easy to market to the everyday Joe. And if they do the job right, would compete head-on with MS making their lives really difficult as the OS is free AND open source
 
Acid.. I know you do .NET dev.. I was wondering if you have had a look at mono and if you will be writing anything for it? Is it even halfway decent?
 
Oh and another point. Google won't integrate their buggy software into their OS like MS does.

I had to mark almost 14 security updates and service packs updates for Office 2007 to not install (over 200megs worth)....

I'm running OpenOffice... now Office 2007 or a trace thereof on my machine (newly formatted)
 
w1z4rd said:
Acid.. I know you do .NET dev.. I was wondering if you have had a look at mono and if you will be writing anything for it? Is it even halfway decent?
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Nope didn't have the chance to, read about it yes. Had to reformat and get running on a Windows machine ASAP again as I left the previous contract I had with a weeks notice (instead of the month they promised me) and had to give up the hardware I was running.

For now I'll go with VBox to do my dev work in which I think is nice. But I'm busy exploring open source like there's no tomorrow.

For once in my life my laptop has a legit copy of everything on it :)
 
I feel like the writer missed one point in a big way.

Your average layman won't run ubuntu/linux distro x on netbooks because a)they don't know even know it exists b)they think its really complicated and only for geeks or c)they think its a crappy os.

This is despite the fact that really, the only thing you'd want to use a netbook for is surfing the net and web based applications, maybe with a bit of word processing. A task that linux is ideally suited to. A google branded linux os designed to plug into their "cloud" with gmail and google docs will really lower peoples reservation about not using windows on their computer becuase hey, who doesn't know google?

Of course thats not to say they'll be able to deliver a windows killer, chrome the browser certainly hasn't killed anything - much less IE. But when I hear them talking about features like booting up in a couple of seconds - I think that will help people from under the windows 7 umbrella very quickly!
 
AcidRaZor said:
Oh and another point. Google won't integrate their buggy software into their OS like MS does.
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MS have claimed for years that IE was integrated into the OS and could not be extracted or uninstalled without crippling the OS, and they may have deliberately coded it like that to back up their claims to the anti-trust lawyers.

This was all false and smokescreen tactics. <shocked that MS would deliberately LIE...>

Enter Windows 7E. Windows 7 without IE for Europe.
 
So the message to Google clearly is this
Join force with Ubuntu and go after desktops!!!!

"Save the cheerleader, save the world!"
 
fak M$ they will have to do cut under $100 for all their software to get my money ever again..
Oh yeas and actually start making software that works and stop wasting money on license protecting mechanisms. Make it good and affordable and you will need not worry about the piracy

Oh yes and lets not forget how they force themselves on the retailers and OEM to peddle their sha1t OS (Vista prime example)
 
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