Different century

After a couple of months of using MS Office products, I feel like I stepped back to the previous century. One application says it all: MS Outlook.
After using free Gmail (still Beta), I get upset every single day when I have to use MS O. It is slow, extremely inconvenient to use, unreliable and lacks certain features.
A simple thing like search: my boss has lots of emails. So do I on my private email. Finding one takes me about 0.5 second. At most. It takes him 1-2 minutes. Unfortunately, one cannot forward his business email to gmail for seemingly obvious reasons: security of information. But can anyone explain to me what is the difference between trusting MS to secure the software on servers, on your desktop and in between and trusting Google?
BTW: during 3 years, I could not access Gmail for about 5 hours total - and I had a backup, of course. During 6 weeks in my new job, I could not access Outlook for 3 hours already. And there was no backup. Great experience!
Other products are similarly terrible. And someone has to pay for them. A lot. Why???

Overall, anything I use from Google tells me that Microsoft is way, way behind Google. The only thing that keeps MS running is the monopoly position and that huge, disgusting cash cow it runs.

Microsoft

Beginnings of Microsoft are little know in post-communist countries, because first PCs became available about 10 years after their introduction in the US.

Microsoft was so successful not because of the quality of its software (Microsoft does not even know what quality means till today), but because they realized the value of monopoly position and how much money you can make if dictate the standards.

They did not start as a company doing something better. They started by lying about their ability to deliver on time. They announced software 2 years before release just to fend off potential competitors. They underpaid all their employees. They cheated and lied to their customers, and general public. The main "goal" was to get the monopoly position, to "kill their competitors", no matter what. (For example, Bill Gates allegedly said "MS-DOS is not done until Lotus stops working". They used secret API, slowed down or prevented competing programs for running. Netscape story is peanuts against everything else that was going on. Their "mascot" was a Borg half-machine, half-humane with the tune "Resistance is futile".

They succeeded and we pay the price till today. There is no operating system worse than Microsoft and none is more expensive. And no producer of OS makes more money.

So far, it might be a story about a few smart thieves, liars and cheaters, who got rich, no harm done. But we all pay for their wealth and it is not a (economically) harmless transfer. We pay by our low productivity, by the need to patch, protect, anti-spam our computers and networks, by significant amounts of time and energy lost in productivity due to their programs that are sometimes intentionally made defective.

Compare this with Google - a company started also by two guys. They did something better than everybody else. They never asked or strive for monopoly position (and they don't have it). Their motive is "Don't do evil", instead of a pure evil symbol from Star Trek.

It boggles my mind how much money have been lost due to Microsoft in the past and how much will be in the future. Because they have their monopoly position and they are not going to give it up. Voluntarily.

Google Sets

Even though it is close to 1st April, this is no joke. New service by Google, Google Sets, is just unbelievable.From even two words in Czech, ie. obscure language spoken by about 10 mil. people, it generates large set of similar, logically related words. I was not able to find an example that would not work (I'm sure there are some).
Apart from Google Translate, this is another step closer to "mechanical understanding" of human language.

It feels comfortable to know that Google's 16000 (give or take a few thousand) work on problem like that, while I enjoy the results for free.

When money don't matter

... you can afford to get a $1 salary.

Privacy

Daniel Docekal, a Czech IT journalist (of sorts), does not like Google. He also does not like Google and DoubleClick deal, ie., the fact that Google both No.2. firm selling banner to complement its business of contextual ads.
He does like it because the deals might allow Google to be able to "identify" us, to say exactly who we are. Sadly, he does not explain why, except for the fact that when more websites are monitored, more is learned. DoubleClick is too small to make a difference, anyway. But there is a more important question (two of them, actually) which DD does not ask.
First question is what the identity is and how it can Google (or Microsoft, - I believe Google more than Microsoft, but substitute for Google name of any larger IT firm in the following text) learn. In the non-IT sense, identity is simple - it's the proof that you are who you are. I have to do this whenever I need from Czech government and it requires my ID, which was issued by government. It has some information about me and my picture. Such identity does not exists online. For some transactions it could be replace by electronic ID (secret key/token, which allows you to sign documents you intend to send to the government who has the public key), but that's not what the Google is after. They want to know "who you are". It means what you like, where (approximately is enough) you live, how much money you have/earn, what makes you spend them (and when). For meta-analysis, it might be useful to know to what kind of advertisement you react or even know that you don't is useful (special price could be offered to you).
The ultimate goal of all this is to offer you a perfect ads (by Google) and make you pay as much as possible (by producers/sellers). Surprisingly (for some), "as much as possible" may be less than the list (usual) price - if you can't or don't want to buy Porsche at current price, maybe 5% discount will make you change your opinion. If this discount is aimed just at you and it is worth doing for the seller, you purchase the car and both sides are happy. Eventually, very well aimed ads could replace general price discrimination tools (like coupons, annual sales etc.), but that's long future.
Right know, Google wants to know as much as possible to serve you the ad you are most likely to click on. In the near future, Google wants to serve you an ad that will make you do something on the advertised sale (register, compare products, buy them...). He does not need to know who you really are to do that. Your name, precise address, your Social Security Number ("Rodne cislo") and plenty of other characteristics are irrelevant. Most of the characteristics are irrelevant for most of the advertisements, at least for now. But even if all these characteristics (all websites you visited, content of all mails you sent) identifies you as a very specific person, is it a bad thing?
That's the second big question. Should you be afraid? Well, some politicians certainly want you to be afraid (so that they can offer you a great solutions if you just vote for them), but you probably should not. But it depends.
If you read all my email, you can probably easily identify me. If you check all websites I visit, you will have harder job, but you still can do it. But what do you actually learn? My name, school, possibly address, occupation, age, financial status... All these things are on my homepage. You don't need to do a sophisticated analysis. This may be atypical, but plenty of people post many things about themselves on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or their blog. By reading these sources you can learn more than by checking websites I visited last year.
Still, somebody (something) out there can link your online activities with a real person and thus find out it's hobbies. So what?
I can imagine couple of evil uses of this information if it ever reaches Googles hands or G. turns evil. For example, one could tailor spam using this information (spam seemingly coming from a friend from high school would get more attention). One could launch a real-life scam by using this information to choose you. Somebody might store this information and blackmail you with it later.
All this might happen, but it does not really scare me. I expect people that rarely know me to try to scam me and I don't think one should be any more trusting in real life than online. I don't think I can be successfully blackmailed (surely not now). One certainly get's some exposure that moves him from anonymous person to somewhat know person (like not-well-know politician). But your blog or homepage does much more damage. The information that Google has is mostly useless for anything else than the advertising and it is highly guarded secret. Your blog and Facebook page reveals your tastes, hobbies and friends to everybody.

I told you so

I'm happy to see big guy to agree with me.

Question of the Day

Why are people concerned about Google "lock-in", when one of the products when Google could enforce lock-in (Gmail), all possible forms of access are available (POP3, IMAP and forwarding). Contrast this to Yahoo and Microsoft, who do not offer forwarding (which means you are stuck with them for the rest of your life, in one way or the other.) Yahoo at least allows you to forward you messages for a fee ($20/year). Still, Google wins in terms of quality, so he does not need lock-in.

What defines Google?

I think nothing does it better than this:

"What sets Google apart, Schmidt told me in another conversation, is that although people like him always assumed that 'Google would be an important company, the founders always assumed that Google would be a defining company.' He remembers a day in 2002 when he walked into Page's office and Page started to show off a book scanner he had built. 'What are you going to do with that, Larry?' Schmidt recalls asking. 'We're going to scan all the books in the world,' Page replied. Eventually, Google began to do just that."

Hat tip to Google System and New Yorker

Google and Microsoft

Some people say that Google is the new Microsoft. They usual do not compliment the business success or benefits to the users, but they mean a new, big monopoly, that will, to put it economically, extract the surplus from you as much as possible.
Google is indeed successful. Google dominates market for search, text ads, has a strong position in mail. Google offers wide range (and fast growing) of services ( list here, just take a look, you would be surprised how many. And Google enters the Instant Messaging market (GTalk), Phones ( Android) etc.
Most of these service benefit experience users, but their simplicity and well-thought design makes them attractive for low-end consumers, too. For example, Wal-Mart is selling $200 PC with Linux preloaded with many Google applications (like Google Documents instead of Microsoft Office suit etc.), and has a big success with it.
As we all know, you cannot please everybody, so some people are scared and are getting angry. Google has access to so much information about you, is becoming so strong and big that it is not hard to imagine it will become (almost) a monopoly, like Microsoft. And such monopolies are not good for consumers (nor even for security, as everybody without firewall, antivirus, anti-spyware and malware running Windows can probably testify).
Having such monopoly in information services would probably be disastrous, right?
No, not really. The reason why Microsoft is a problematic monopoly while Google is not is in the "networking" properties (in economic sense) of their services. Microsoft is building things that you want to use because others are using them. You cannot switch because your documents will not be accessible to others, you could not download as many programs as there are for Windows (who would write them for operating systems nobody is using, right). With Google, this is not true. Not only most services do not have network benefits (like Gmail - you can read your emails anywhere you want, even if I send them from Gmail; you can search with Yahoo and I can search with Google and there is no big problem for either of us because of that), but they are designed to be open. For example, Google Documents allow you to export your documents to wide range of formats so that they are accessible for you colleagues. That is something Microsoft was never serious about.
OK, it is possible that Google is doing the second part (openness) only to enter the market and will stop when it has its monopoly positions. Maybe. But the first part will be still true. I can use any Google services I want and you do not benefit (nor you are harmed) by using other services. Moreover, it is very easy to switch - the only thing it requires is for you to learn some new things (shortcuts, commands etc.) It does not require you to convince your boss that Microsoft Word is really not a good format for in-firm documents.
Therefore, I'm not particularly concerned about Google. Moreover, the part when Google would be fighting with Microsoft over the world dominance would be long (they both had cash to burn) and fun (for the consumers).