This analysis is sorely lacking perspective. I could pick on a bunch of things but I'll just choose one to make my point.
Cringely's assertion that Google should fear making Google search not work on Windows PCs is ludicrous. Period. Anyone who seriously thinks any broadly successful (public) company would pull a stunt like that and piss off the vast bulk of their users has lost touch with reality.
I'm glad you said it because to be honest I was thinking the same thing and was worried about getting flamed. But I'm with you.
After reading this my first thought was "Has the NY Times come to the point where their space is worth so little that they'll just let Cringley ramble on for a couple pages?" There's virtually no real insight here. Just a bunch of random observations from a guy whose been out of the loop for more than a decade.
Not even the PR implications, but just the security/technical. How does an OS vendor block access to a website? Deny it in the hosts file? Add a default firewall rule? Code a special case in IE?
Any such incident would cause irrevocable damage with any government/enterprise and push them to abandon the platform entirely. As you say, it's just absurd.
Like a computer where you can only buy apps from a single site owned by the maker and only connect to the net through a single service provider - no consumer would ever go for that.
Absurd? Ludicrous? Okay, maybe it's a bit of a stretch, but if you look at Microsoft's long track record of harming consumers, I wouldn't bet the farm against it.
Let me see... how about not supporting HTML5? That would pretty much kill all of the new Google products for 70% of the PC market... And it's not immediately grounds for an anti-trust lawsuit.
The vast majority of Google searches are, of course, done on PCs running Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. It is not in Google’s real interest to displace these products, which have facilitated so much of its success.
I call bullshit. This suggests that if Windows and Internet Explorer were replaced by some other browser or OS, then people would search less on Google, which is ridiculous. As long as the number of people using the replacement products remain the same, the number of searches performed on Google should remain the same, all else remaining equal. It's not like Google searches run especially fast on Windows and IE.
And don't forget Apple, which with the iPod and iPhone has shown an ability to revolutionize markets other companies saw as mature.
Did people really think MP3 players and phones were anywhere near "mature" before Apple's products? I remember getting my girlfriend a pre-iPod MP3 player back around 2002... she never figured out how to put her music on there, and ended up getting an iPod as soon as she started buying music via iTunes.
Yesterday's Office Depot flyer had 12 laptops and 1 desktop, exactly the reverse of 3 years ago. Who knows, in 3 years it may have 12 handhelds and 1 laptop.
One thing's for sure. If your software has problems running on smaller and smaller hardware, you're doomed. Just ask DEC, Wang, Qantel, Basic4, Data General, etc.
With Chrome, Google is attacking Microsoft's Achilles heel. If Microsoft's response is another Vista, it should be interesting.
Hm, a lot of opinions here, ranging in insight. This one was the most perceptive, in my opinion:
It’s not as if these companies are gearing up to produce automobiles. The engineering teams for any of these products are, at most, 20 to 30 people — immaterial for Microsoft, which has 90,000 or so employees, and Google, which has 20,000. Nor are all of Google’s products even guaranteed to ship, being as they are in that semi-solid technical state called beta test and subject to cancellation on a whim.
The problem with this statement is that Cringely has no way of knowing this and the facts publicly available contradict his account.
Just to give one example look at Steve Ballmer and Bing. Unless he's flat out lying he's going to spend 5% to 10% of Microsoft's operating income on Bing (http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/171648.asp). That's not exactly immaterial as Cringely claims.
All of that spending thus far has been on marketing / advertising bullshit.
They're probably blowing piles of money on datacenters too, but they'd be doing that anyway even if the Bing thing never happened. They see Google doing it and feel left out!
This comment is wrong bordering on the obscene. Does he think Bing, which competes with Google feature-for-feature, can be built by 30 people, while Google itself needs most of its 20,000 employees to build its search engine? The same goes for the ChromeOS vs. Windows case. It's as though he thinks both Bing and ChromeOS are just toy products, mere demos designed to poke the competitors or rile up the press. They're not.
I have found Cringely to be usually essentially correct even if he is wrong on details. You just have to know which details are important and which are not. The strategic importance of Windows to Google and for Microsoft of not again getting the attention of the Justice Department by anti-competitively squeezing Google functionality on Windows (now that Bush is out of office) is absolutely correct.
Microsoft is clearly going to provide Google enough competition that they cannot roam too far into Microsoft's profit center. And Google is absolutely focused on Search using OSes to press the market (including Microsoft) in directions that Google needs to maintain its position and grow it.
Cringely is absolutely correct on the points that matter here. Contrary arguments centered on staffing sizes and such are I think probably correct but missing the point.
Cringely's assertion that Google should fear making Google search not work on Windows PCs is ludicrous. Period. Anyone who seriously thinks any broadly successful (public) company would pull a stunt like that and piss off the vast bulk of their users has lost touch with reality.