Back when Microsoft first started fearing that open standards/platform independent web browsers could threaten its lucrative operating system monopoly, they set out to destroy Netscape, the dominant player in the field, by giving away Internet Explorer for free. And it worked. Sorta.
Yesterday, Google announced its new Chrome OS, and its intent to give away the operating system for free. Wonder where they got that idea?
Die, Microsoft, die. You’ve bled me for too many years with your lousy “upgrades.” You maxed out in 1995. Bill Gates pushing a shopping cart and living on the streets of Seattle would suit me just fine.
PS The lack of “spellcheck” in the current system is a symptom of your total lack of ability to retain good parts without fucking up.
So if being free is a condition of killing Microsoft.. How’s that working out for Linux? :)
Should I sell my MSFT stock while the getting is still halfway good?
Anyone priced an Apple lately?
Shipping an OS is a big deal. It’s kind of hard to do. A couple of things: you need to do a LOT of testing to make sure it works right, you have to get application developers on your bandwagon, and you have to protect it from viruses and malware, which is tough when your user is the typical ignorant (not stupid) consumer.
Google has deep pockets and wants to give it away for free to gain quick and dirty market share, but doing an OS right is really expensive, and Google hasn’t shown that they have great programmers, and if you don’t catch on right away it becomes less and less defensible as a business to be in.
Microsoft will probably drop its price for netbook OS (they have deep pockets too) and Google will have a tough time. But competition is good for the consumer.
There’s been an alternative called Linux that’s been around quite a while. The main thing that’s prevented its wider adoption has been the lack of a huge corporate marketing campaign.
Often, it’s not how well your product works that’s important. It’s how effectively you peddle it. That has a lot to do with why most of us are eating crap and getting around in heaps of metal propelled by dead dinosaurs.
Yesbut…..Microsoft has a huge army of fully justified haters who have no great hardon against Thegoogle. There is, inevitably, a price for extreme arrogance, cf. Republican Party
Goldy–
Why not focus on the Boeing ultimatum?
Do you think Boeing is bluffing?
Should Washington State let them go South to a Right to Work State??
I told you this day of reckoning was fast approaching.
Here it is.
Sounds great to ME. The days of corporate welfare in this country are coming to an end as people realize what’s going on. Yeah, yeah, I know….all that payroll.
But why should I subsidize Boeing workers? That’s communism.
@7 Maybe our “leadership” should have quit sucking up to Boeing (and giving them all those tax breaks and subsidies) long ago if it was going to come to this anyway.
Historically there have been two reasons for Boeing being in the Northwest: (1.) Bill Boeing liked it here; and (2.) the availability of key resources. Number Two was originally spruce from the Olympic Peninsula, followed by cheap BPA power making it economical to smelt aluminum here. The cheap-energy factor is still somewhat important, but much less so as the entire way of building airplanes undergoes the biggest change since the switch to riveted aluminum from cloth and wood. The labor force might not be as significant as a location where (ahem!) environmental awareness doesn’t make it a chore to deal with the chemical glop that’s left over from making big things out of plastic. No doubt the “rambling wrecks” from Georgia Tech are every bit as capable as engineers trained at the UW.
7 Cynical
No, we should protect worker’s rights at the federal level so that we don’t have states racing to the bottom.
Mr. “I don’t have any business sense” Cyn.
Have you read about Boeing’s latest debacle on their bet of future dominance, the 787 Dreamliner?
Yeah, they tried that route in the South, and Japan and Italy.
It’s cost them billions and billions of dollars in cost overruns, reengineering, retrofits, fix’s and lost business.
I know this becaue one of my neighbors is an engineer on the wing component for the 787. He’s working mandatory 14 hour days 6 days a week to fix this mess.
Going the cheap labor route was, in the end, very, very expensive. There’s talk now inside of Boeing to bring that work back to Seattle if it isn’t fixed ASAP.
Airbus, the union paying, socialist country based competitor is ready to kick Boeing’s ass for decades if they don’t get this problem fixed fast.
I wonder if AOL 9.1 is North Korean malware?
@5 “Often, it’s not how well your product works that’s important. It’s how effectively you peddle it.”
If there’s anything I learned in business, this is it. If you invent a better mousetrap the world will not beat a path to your door. You have to beat the drum for your mousetrap, and even then it might not sell. A product that doesn’t work won’t sell for very long no matter how effective the marketing is, but lots and lots of very good products have fallen by the wayside because the fickle market moved on to something else.
The watering down, adulterating, and cheapening of formerly good products and the ruthless prostituting of once-respected brand names is another issue altogether albeit a pervasive one.
@7 “Why not focus on the Boeing ultimatum?”
If you saw Mel Gibson wag his bare ass at the English army in “Braveheart,” you’d know exactly what to do about Boeing’s latest demands.
“Do you think Boeing is bluffing?”
Who cares? Let’s pick a fight with them just for sport.
“Should Washington State let them go South to a Right to Work State??”
Why not? They’ve already gone to China. You, and our esteemed congresspesons, don’t seem to understand they’re already gone. They keep a token presence in our state to see how much more they can extract from frightened politicians. How long should the union keep caving? Until wages are $8.50 an hour and they have to sign indentured servitude agreements? A no-strike clause is the last thing a union should give to a company that’s doing everything in its power to provoke strikes.
You know what, Cynical? I’m tired of Boeing’s whining. I’m tired of the fucking tin cup. I’m tired of their endless bleating and bullying and demanding. I’m tired of their blaming the union for their own screwups. Fuck ’em, they can’t leave fast enough to suit me.
@10 I think the Obama administration should impose a tax on companies that move because communities refuse to cater to their extortionate threats. Say, a tax equal to their profits for the next 50 years. Call that “communism” if you want, it’s no worse than the corporate communism that Boeing has been practicing for years and years.
MSFT is the best marketer around: it’s the technology part that they’re falling behind in. They are making lousy products but still selling the damn things. Maybe this little Google thing will get their attention.
I suppose if you don’t have to do any school or office work, if you don’t have to communicate with Windows computers on a network, if you don’t have to produce or consume documents that are fully compatible with Office, maybe a Chrome netbook that doesn’t do anything but give you a Web browser might seem attractive.
It’s not a “real” OS. The Google Chrome OS is just a stripped down simplified Linux distribution intended for netbooks or other small internet access devices…maybe cell phones too. But it’s not anything like a ‘real’ OS. It can’t run standard desktop software. Being “lightweight” so it can boot up in 2 or 3 seconds means it can’t HAVE any complicated peripheral drivers and such. I don’t want to knock the concept. We DO need a ‘mini-linux’ for netbooks where you ONLY need to pull up a web browser and do online (google) email. But for gaming, office work and other apps, it’s not going to do those. It won’t take ANY % of share away from Microsoft.
P.S. I prefer Mac OS X anyway (which by the way is also Linux based, but as a large scale OS). Your TIVO is also a Linux OS. The new Plam Pre (which I have and love) is a Linux based phone OS. So this is really nothing new.
Sorry, Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD Unix, not Linux, as is the iPhone OS.
18 NYSI
The danger of this platform to Microsoft, as it was when Netscape was planning much the same thing, is that IF you can establish a robust enough set of Web apps, then the browser effectively becomes the OS and the OS becomes middleware.
Now that is a big “if,” especially when one considers, as you did, the role of the traditional OS in driving peripherals, graphics, sound, video codecs, network access, and so on. But that is the danger, and it’s one that Microsoft will not want to come to fruition.
18, drivers won’t be that much of an issue. The vast majority of hardware out there today works out-of-the-box from the drivers built in to the Linux kernel.
Also, Chrome isn’t exclusively a web browser, it’s simply focused around it since for many modern consumers the browser is just about all they do. Granting that they’ve revealed few details of the project, I heard word of a new windowing system – which is only needed if you plan to have two windows open.
“It can’t run standard desktop software.”
It’ll run standard Linux software. ;)
Sounds like the Fringe Lunatic Left want to either kick Boeing to the kurb…..or Daddy Love wants Federal Laws to make them stay.
Good thing grown-ups are in charge.
Hey Cyn @22, have you bought any more bricks of ammo lately? Come the revolution, I wouldn’t want you to run low.
@4 Shipping an OS is a big deal. It’s kind of hard to do. A couple of things: you need to do a LOT of testing to make sure it works right, you have to get application developers on your bandwagon, and you have to protect it from viruses and malware, which is tough when your user is the typical ignorant (not stupid) consumer.
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Oh, let’s not forget to add that you need to ship a product that’s not REGULARLY filled with security holes. Here:
Microsoft: Attacks on Unpatched Windows Flaw
“Microsoft warned today (July 6) that hackers are targeting a previously unknown security hole in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 systems to break into vulnerable PCs. Today’s advisory includes instructions on how to mitigate the threat from this flaw.”
[http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix]
If anyone has demonstrated time and again that shipping a OS is hard to do, it’s Microsoft.
This product SHOULD be free.
GBS
Yep all those EU companies giving them subsidies.
24 J
When Chrome has 90% of the desktop OS market (and whenever will that be?) which OS do you think virus developers will be targeting THEN?
Security is an arms race in which the attackers are virtually always ahead, and the race is to close holes approximately as fast as they find and exploit them. Microsoft does that. Anyone who wants to stay in business has to.
22 Cyn
I don’t really care what Boeing does. It does appear that their deal with non-union Vought, in that shining example of incompetence and sloppiness, “right to work” South Carolina, has turned into such a nightmare of “problems with components made by suppliers and work that suppliers didn’t complete” as well as “ill-fitting parts and other problems” that “are expected to cost the airplane maker billions of dollars in added expenses and penalties,” that they have to BUY to company to make them work properly. “Right to work” is a synonym for “badly-educated, underpaid employees who don’t give a shit.”
But I don’t want the federal government to make them stay. As Roger pointed out, they kind of already left.
I want the federal governemt to ensure that workers in every state have the right to organize and collectively bargain, and the employers in every state will be barred from and punished for unfair labor practices. Damn right.
Another free product coming your way is Google Wave. Think email on steroids. (Or Butt Putty on super lube.)
Wave was announced at Google I/O 2009 and has been causing quite a stir in the development community.
wave.google.com
Click on the link to watch the (80 minute) video.
If Chrome OS is anything like Chrome Browser then no thanks..
In the United States we call them “tax breaks.”
Bottom line: Airbus is starting to KICK Boeing’s ass. They had better drop the Reagan Republican mindset of business if they want to survive.
Washington state gave BILLIONS of dollars worth of tax breaks and concessions to Boeing to keep them here.
Should Boeing exercise their right to leave the state, Washington state officials should exercise their Eminent Domain rights over Boeing property and facilities in our state on behalf of the taxpayers. Then, we’ll make one hell of a deal with Airbus to bring some of their work here and get them into the lucrative defense work.
Seriously, loyalty is a two way street. If Boeing wants to be disloyal to us, then we’ll just return the favor.
26 That’s a pretty common Microsoft apologist line. Except, most security experts will tell you, UNIX (the basis of both OSX and Linux) is simply more secure than Windows.
Linux also has a track record of responding much more quickly to security threats than proprietary OSes such as Windows and OSX – the last major security threat I can recall, the Debian encryption problem, was fixed in a matter of days, and rolled out just as soon.
I won’t say operating systems just grow on trees, but it is entirely possible to put out a secure, usable, working operating system without demanding $150 every few years from your customers. Especially when you stop treating your userbase like idiots.
@26 When Chrome has 90% of the desktop OS market (and whenever will that be?) which OS do you think virus developers will be targeting THEN?
——————
This begs the question. Microsoft has shipped software full of holes for years, and it goes to the heart of their shoddy software development practices. We used NT in the late nineties for our Web servers and that was a nightmare (in one particularly difficult stretch the OS had a memory leak and our servers – the ones used by OUR customers – kept crashing). Every time your former chairman talked about developing more “great software” I cringed.
All the power to Google. They’ve developed more innovative and useful tools in just a few years then Microsoft has in decades.
@22 “want to either kick Boeing to the kurb…”
Ya think?? And they can take Frank Colaccurcio Sr. with them. Two less gangsters bleeding our community white.
@23 “I wouldn’t want you to run low.”
I would. Nothing’s as much fun in war as the other guy running out of ammo before you do. Then you get to put your bayonet training into practice.*
* Hey, just fucking kidding! We’re all friends here. We merely play a little rough, that’s all.
@31 I agree. Gary Locke paid Boeing a $3 billion bribe to build the 787 here. If they welsh, we should demand the $3 billion back, and if they don’t pay, we should do a till tap on their local assets.
JarenL@32
Well, yeah and no.
Comparing Linux to Windows < 2000 was like shooting fish in a barrel. Linux WAS clearly better. Windows had a flat memory model which allowed any piece of refuse you downloaded/ran to crash your system, overwrite your files, etc.
As painful as it is to say, the default NT privilege model provides a lot more granularity and can be made much more secure (in theory! More on this in a second) than Linux.
The largest problems Windows has are related to how its administered, not the internal architecture of the OS.
In the UNIX/Linux/Mac world, you do your work as an unprivileged user. You would NEVER stay logged into your system as “root” all day. You only do privilege escalation when necessary. If your browser has an exploit or weakness, the only consequence is that your individual account gets torched and trashed. BFD.
Well-administered Windows machines run under the same model. Daily work is done by an unprivileged user, and administration is done by a user with some or all admin rights.
Problem is, where outside of a corporate IT environment do you see a system set up like that? Everyone and her dog logs in as a full administrative user! And go off to surf Bulgarian Hobo Porn sites. And are then SHOCKED! SHOCKED! when viruses and malware wind up on their systems.
En passant Here’s a link to a paper hosted at Stanford by several of Google’s architects which explains the security model of the Chrome browser and how it differs from other browsers. If you read between the lines, you can also guess as to where they may be going with the Chrome OS.
http://bit.ly/H6eZu
(warning: This paper is highly technical and is not intended for lay readers. If you get more than 4 paragraphs in without all the blood running to your head, send me your résumé)
OK. Enough about computers. Back to beating everyone up over politics.
@37
I think I understand the “sandbox” idea from context, but wudja care to splain it?
X’ad@38
The concept behind a “sandbox” is fairly simple. In a monolithic browser (i.e. older versions of IE, Firefox, etc.) the process has a single memory space, and this memory space is shared across all instances of the browser.
This should be more efficient in terms of resource usage (i.e. you’re not allocating a separate process space for every tab or every browser window with all the overhead that would involve), but you are also relying on the inherent benevolence of any code running in that space. As more and more of the browsing experience is handed over to extensions of one sort or another (PDF readers, Shockwave players, media players, etc.) you are quickly losing control of your memory space.
A “sandbox” architecture sets up a protected memory space for each tab where all operations take place. You will have an API which can be used to accomplish core browsing tasks (i.e. HTML rendering), and a mechanism to spawn external processes which are confined to whatever space the sandbox architecture permits.
A limitation mentioned in the paper is that browser sandboxes are not absolute. In a “pure” sandbox, the process runs with no visibility to the host filesystem, and all files are saved to a temporary scratch space, which would be destroyed after the browser VM is collapsed. Of course, you want to use your browser to upload pictures to webmail, or download content, so that model isn’t realistic.
Hope that helps.
As a followup, in case you’re looking and going “Well, that’s obvious! Why didn’t it get done that way in the first place?” The answers are multiple. The core issue is feature creep. Early browsers didn’t rely nearly as much on external executables as modern ones do.
By putting everything into a sandbox architecture, you are adding substantial overheads as things that used to be internal function calls are now (directly or indirectly) IPC. In addition, by having to rigorously define your interface, you are adding complexity.
This is getting out of my core area of competence. If you have more questions, ask a software architect.