Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Tale of two (three) platforms: a precursor

Let me finish this post as a precursor of the thesis writing... have been stalling for a while but today I feel like writing...

Recently, there are several blog posts that again try to dissect the trend and the collision between Microsoft and Google, and how the trend starts to shift to the GOOG side not only on the search front but in other domains such as enterprise app, web contents and cloud computing.  Here are the several that I recommend:

An anecdote: while Microsoft is far from bankrupt (which is a case made in by Don and MS Jobsblog), it is not interesting anymore.  I guess I only have around 1 month to trump whatever I dislike about MSFT publicly so please bare with me...

1. MS is still trying its best to court the developers, its technology just isn't what a programming prospect (a.k.a. alpha geeks such as Mr. Gate himself) would use to build killer app such as Ruby on Rail or facebook...

2. Well there's the naming confusion problem... but besides the unappealing name, and despite the efforts to court enterprises, MS app are just not the most elegant to use anymore.  The simplicity and elegance now belong to GOOG.  Besides the Windows and Office, it's difficult to find an average user who use other MS services. 

Email

IMHO, GMail still trumps Hotmail

  • in terms of mail organization (conversation-based and tag is certainly easier to read and retrieve),
  • free of banner ads that takes up some important spaces and quirks me.  Please...I'd rather have textual/relevant ad than display ads that keeps flashing and quirks my eyes... and... if you cannot get rid of it please... put it either at the side or the bottom instead of the VERY TOP!  Putting animated ads on top is just plain distracting.  You know... I DON'T NEED TO PAY to have good mail services, so stop making me pay!
  • ease of use (no keyboard shortcut in hotmail).  I guess hotmail is not designed by the ribbon team...

RSS Reader

I stick with MS Live even though I never use the Live Search (it's just not good enough).  I was used to start.com and then switched and got too lazy to reorganize the page.  Last time I checked... in terms of RSS feed MS Live is still better than iGoogle because I can add feeds easier.  But neither technologies get much attention... the talk of the town is Google Reader.  One day if I have enough free time I will do the switch.

Word processor/spreadsheet

While Google App is no where as competent as Office (and probably will never be), it is the most promising online office suite and with Google Gears in in maturity, the platform will gradually migrate from desktop to the cloud, at least for users like me who don't want to pay $500 for a full-fledge Office 2007.  Office 2007 will remains dominant... but the web platform will be lost.

Yes, it's all about the platform.  The control of the platform will determine the relevancy of both companies in the Web 2.0 era.  So far Google has the edge as being the command line of the Internet.  It is unlikely to change unless Microsoft builds a search engine that is not only as good but way better than Google.  While it's certainly not impossible, Google will remains dominant.  (Ask a friend which search engine he/she will choose: Google or Live Search.  I bet you the answer will be: "what Live search?  isn't it called MSN?  Well that's the answer Caryn gave me).

While it's certainly impossible to take on Google now, search is definitely NOT the platform... it's only a gateway to the web.  There are a few suggestions I have to win back the platform:

Browser

What is the reason the IE is most bloated (in terms of memory), slowest, and the one most prone to attack among the big three browsers.  For me, my IE 7 could never get pass the http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx site and it only shows error on page in the status bar.  Eventually I was fed up and I never used it (not even for experimenting) since it cogs memory and is slower.  Most of the ppl I know from school use firefox... that's certain an evidence of lost of alpha geeks...

Now Joel Spolsky has spoken up: Safari is just loads faster and although it's not perfect, but sure that by October Apple will release a polished product that can compete head-to-head with firefox .  MS has conceded the music market to iTune, but the lost of the browser market will be detrimental.

Now it is time to rally the best talents again for IE 8.  Make it easier to use and faster; make it less coupling with other MS products to make it more flexible; and... make it a cross-platform browser please... Linux is a small community but nevertheless a powerful one.  And if you believe IE is really better... why not give it to the Mac user who have been thirsting in hell? (for those who don't get the joke please see here)

Online app and synchronization

Yes popfly is nice, but it's time to step out of these small pilot project and build a killer app for the Web 2.0 world.  At least be prepared to release an online MS Office (not the Office Live) suite that contains sufficient functionality for normal users who used the pirate version of Office.  Given MS's experience in productivity suite, if the online version is not too entangled with other MS services (like Office Live or Sharepoint which... yea... I have NO IDEA what it's about even after some wiki-ing), and perform as well as Google App, then MS will surely win.  Yes it will mean some deference from the Office cash cow but you gotta take a risk to do some great.  It's again a dilemma between dominance and revenue.  Revenue is great but once you lose your dominance the revenue will eventually diminish... don't believe it?  Just look at IBM...

With Google Gears, the synchronization problem will be solved and the need for desktop application will diminish.  I won't reiterate the points, but MS still retains the two greatest assets will let it win the war: the browser and the operating system.  Solve the problem (the most difficult part), then embed it as a window updates.  Then release the API so that third parties can use the tool to develop synchronized online app.  Here is the platform!  Well I know it's easier to be said than done... but I gotta say it now!  Well no one reads the blog anyway... so let me abuse my freedom of speech while I still can!

Community platform

Unless one day WLS gets rid of the banner ad, blogger will still be my favorite blog tool.  Well WLS integrates better with WLW (and it seems I cannot post pictures on blogspot with WLW).  But blog is so yesterday.  Today, the platform is facebook.

Btw... here is my profile.  I'm not sure if anyone will see this blog and add me... but let's see.

My recommendations?  Buy it before it's too late.  Facebook has the potential to be the next platform.  I guess since Bill and Mark are both Harvard alumni there is a chance.  Certainly, MSFT can afford $6 billion.  Google is going strong and Yahoo! is looking to regroup.  Losing facebook to either of them or let it become another platform is a serious threat.

I have in mind how to extend the facebook platform... maybe another post.  (Not that anyone will care enough to read it and take it seriously anyway :D )

P.S. Well it took 2 hours... which meant a whole day of work.  I guess I will have to resume the thesis writing tomorrow :(

Problem with startups using MS products

This is a response to Don Dodge's post of Microsoft - a friend to startups.

I guess there are several problems with building-on-top-of/relying on MS technology.  Some are technological and the others are philosophical:

1. Technological: By using MS technology, you place a bet on the proprietary software.  Indeed there are advantages such as supports.  But you also have to rely on the company to fix the bug/release patches.  You need a strong faith that MS produce great products because  you will not be able to fix the bugs on your own.

2. MS technology are tightly integrated, which means I usually have to use the whole package.  MS products are not always the easiest to use (for me... I still have no idea what Sharepoint server is even though I spend a long time reading the wikipedia entry) and will I be willing to sacrifice this flexibility?

3. Economical: although there are incentives, the support cost of MS products will take a toll, esp for startups.  I always thought... maybe the best solution is MS develop a VC branch (like Y combinator) that invests in startups... allow them cheap access to MS products (but not mandatory).

4. Licensing. since most MS products are propriety you might run into the licensing fiasco like TestDriven.NET.

5. MS has to tendency to extend into its customer market.  Nice that you mention the Antivirus market, because MS now directly competes in the market with OneCare.  Now can a startup owner sure if MS will not compete with me one day, esp. since MS is so big and pervasive.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

My recent frustration + another Live Search vs. Google face-off

Well there are some big changes in my life recently. Some of the brothers and sisters in Montreal have been notified already and let me just say that for the next month I will be concentrating on my thesis and not much else. My mind sometimes still wanders off to the la-la-land to reminisced about the lost chances and past sweet memory, so the only way out is sidetrack myself with some works. Unfortunately, I have reached a bottleneck in the thesis project: one of the tools (FINT) that I relied on (but unfortunately not written by me) does not scale well on large test subjects. Before I left for the Ephesus retreat during the weekend I left two machines on to test 3 reasonably big software projects (> 100,000 LOC). I was hoping that after the weekend I would be able to obtain some decent data. When I returned on Monday the machines were still running at full capacity. I waited one more day, hoping that I could eventually obtain the result. Well Monday was a bad day already, but to add insults to injury, McGill shut down the power supply on Monday night. When I came in on Tuesday all the machines were dead. For the past two days I was putting some final efforts to obtain the result from the large projects (azureus and soot) but if the machine is still running tomorrow, then it is time to think of an easier approach so I can actually start analyzing the data.

Honestly I am feeling lost... don't know what I'm fighting or what is the purpose of going to the lab each day. To take my mind off things, I decided to pick up the Python Challenge again. Since I feel my own reluctance to touch the Java language and the Eclipse project maybe python can get me started again.

I'm now reworking all the challenged and I remember reaching level 5. Today I was reworking a piece of code that uses pickle. However, the code needs to open a file and I want to catch the IOError exception better this time. Unlike Java SDK, python lacks a central/organized library for documentation so I decided to search it with both Microsoft's live search and Google.

Although my friends have been telling me recently that I am slowly being converted into a MS-philic and an invisible evangelist of MS technology, I have one recommendation for those friends of mine (probably 0) who want an alternative and free themselves from the Google-centric life:

Forget about it. Google has won. Now move on.

Why?

Round 1: "python errror"... well I unintentionally misspell the word. But it reveals the AI prowess of Google search.

From live search

From Google.image

image

Who won: Google

Why: Google is smart enough to detect my mistake. Live search is stupid and it just retrieves whatever I typed. It shows the vast amount of data that Google possesses and the prowess of the internal inference engine that detects wrong words and correct word. It is especially cunning since IOError is syntactically not an correct English word. It is just a name. But Google knows that most people would have typed IOError and thus when you misspell the word it is able to correct you. Its data IS the dictionary.

Round 2: "Python IOError" and "python IOError library". Well now I want to check if given the correct directives the search engines, it actually returns what I want.

From live search: Well it returns some posts from the python news group (right?). I don't know... it looks garbage to me so I didn't bother to find out.

image

From Google: Right on! It pinpoints to exactly where I need to go.

image

Give you one more chance Microsoft! Let's try a more precise "python IOError exceptions"

This time Live is more promising. Although the first two options are not optimal the third and the fourth ones lead to the right direction. However, you need to take some points off since it still thinks IOError is a misspell.

image

Google: result is less relevant this time. Honestly I tend to skip links that direct to email exchanges or usernet posts since they tend to be unstructured and not authentic enough.

image

Who won: Google

Why: Google is able to point me to the right direction given a small part of information while live needs more help. Just as an aside, it kind of shows the philosophical difference between two companies.

Google: less is better

Microsoft: more is better

However, both are still better that ask.

image

Hey, where is the Algorithm?

P.S. If you still keep track of techcrunch (which I kinda picked up again since I temporarily lost my purpose and now try to sober up and work again), you might have come across with a rumor that MS is sending a team of rockstar developers led by Sanaz Ahari to rebuild the live search engine. I saw Sanaz's video from Scoble show, and I have been using both start.com and personalized live (another confusing misnomer from MS) as my RSS feed reader. Hopefully they can produce something decent cuz I'm now sticking with google. (searching for "techcrunch live search sanaz" for the link proves me right again (sigh~) )

Google Calendar Surprise

 

A new surprise today!
I was using google calenadra calendar and trried tried to add an entry. The event is at 4:13 so I put:
"Mom arrives @ 4:13 (AC XXX)"


When I created the event , the tThe the entry on the calendar becomes:
Mom arrives ACXXX)$
So the time and a brackelt bracket got eaten up!. When I tried to correct it manually I saw th etime the time was adjsuted adjusted to $1;3 - 5:13! Google Clandar Calendar was so smart! But maybe it got TOO smart and ate the bracklet bracket as well. It didn't behave the way I anted it to and I had to manually correct it. It's good that an application is smart...but iwhen when it tries to outsmart you and do something that you don't want, doesn't it quirk you?


When it MS going to make its own Windows Live/MSN//whatever-name-it-becomes Calendar too? But I guess it will have those annoying banner ad on top that makes me throw up so I maybe have to stick with tGoogle Google Calendar again. But I don't like the idea of having mall my data in Google server so I don't use it much anyway. A goo'-old good-ol' notebook is just enough for me :)


OP.S. Blogger is EXTREMELY slow on Linux/Firefox 2. That's why you see all the spelling mistakes! There's IS a reason to love the Windows Live Writer...

 

Update: Finally fixed all the spelling mistakes with WLW.  Pity though... I was searching for the url using Live Search and it fails to return this url in the first spot (the first spot was occupied by WLW blog in Live Space).  In fact, it fails to show up on the first page.  Google returns the WLW url in the third spot instead.  Guess there's still a few catch to do.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Google Calendar Surprise

A new surprise today!

I was using google calenadra and trried to add an entry. The event is at $:13 so I put:

"Mom arrives @ 4:13 (AC XXX)

When I created the event , the tThe entry on the calendar becomes:
Mom arrives ACXXX)

So the time and a brackelt got eaten up!. When I tried to correct it manually I saw th etime was adjsuted to $1;3 - 5:13! Google Clandar was so smart! But maybe it got TOO smart and ate the bracklet as well. It didn't behave the way I anted it to and I had to manually correct it. It's good that an application is smart...but iwhen it tries to outsmart you and do something that you don't want, doesn't it quirk you?

When it MS going to make its own Windows Live/MSN//whatever-name-it-becomes Calendar too? But I guess it will have those annoying banner ad on top that makes me throw up so I maybe have to stick with tGoogle Calendar again. But I don't like the idea of having mall my data in Google server so I don't use it much anyway. A goo'-old notebook is just enough for me :)
OP.S. Blogger is EXTREMELY slow on Linux/Firefox 2. That's why you see all the spelling mistakes! There's IS a reason to love the Windows Live Writer...