This is so crazy. Google invented transformers which is the bases for all these models. How do they keep fumbling like this over and over. Google Docs created in 2006! Microsoft is eating their lunch. Google creates the ability to change VM's in place and makes a fully automated datacenter. Amazon and Microsoft are killing them in the cloud. Google has been working on self driving longer than anyone. Tesla is catching up and will most likely beat them.
I was at MS in 2008 September and internally they had a very beautiful and well functioning Office web already (named differently, forgot the name but it wasn't sharepoint if I recall correctly, I think it had to do something with expense reports?) that would put Google Docs to shame today. They just didn't want to cannibalize their own product.
Kind of, using it became known as "AJAX" and it took many many years (and the addition of promises to JS) before the more sophisticated "Fetch API" became available.
Even then usage of AJAX declined rather slowly as it was so established, and indeed even now it's still used by many websites!
I assume you mean the decline in the use of the term AJAX as it was now just the standard and you don’t need to use that to describe your site or tool as being capable of being highly interactive and dynamic vs just static.
Before the invention of the xmlhttprequest there was so little you could do with JS most dynamic content was some version of shifty tricks with iframes or img tags or anything that could trigger the browser to make a server request to a url that you could generate dynamically.
Fetch was the formalization of the xmlhttprequest (hence the use of xhr as the name of the request type ). Jquery wrapped it really nicely and essentially popularized (they may have invented async js leveraging callbacks and the like), the creation of promises was basically the formalization and standardization of this.
So AJAX itself is in fact used almost in the entire totality of the web, the term has become irrelevant given the absolute domination of the technology.
Funny, I asked Google Bard to guess what the actual product name was from the comment.
"It was probably Office Web Apps. It was a web-based office suite that was introduced in 2008. It included Word Web App, Excel Web App, Powerpoint Web App, and OneNote Web App. It was not SharePoint, but it was based on SharePoint technology."
Don’t forget that McAfee was delivering virus scanning in a browser in 1998 with active x support, TinyMCE was full wysiwyg for content in the browser by 2004, and Google docs was released in 2006 on top of a huge ecosystem of document solutions and even some real-time co-authoring document writing platforms.
2008 is late to the party for a docs competitor! Microsoft got the runaround by Google and after Google launched docs they could have clobbered Microsoft which kind of failed to respond properly in kind, but they didn’t push the platform hard enough to eat the corporate market share, and didn’t follow up with a share point alternative that would appeal to the enterprise, and kind of blew the opportunity imo.
I mean to this day Google docs is free but it still hasn’t unseated Word in the marketplace, but the real killer app that keeps office on top is Excel, which some companies built their entire tooling around.
It’s crazy interesting to look back and realize how many twists there were leading us to where we are today.
Btw it was Office Server or Sharepoint Portal earlier (this is like Frontpage days so like 2001?) and Microsoft called it Tahoe internally. I don’t think it became Sharepoint until Office 365 launched.
The XMLHTTP object launched in 2001 and was part of the dhtml wave. That gave a LOT of the capabilities to browsers that we currently see as browser-based word processing, but there were efforts with proprietary extensions going back from there they just didn’t get broad support or become standards. I saw some crazy stuff at SGI in the late 90s when I was working on their visual workstation series launch.
1. Poor Google Drive interface makes managing documents difficult.
2. You cannot just get a first class Google Doc file which you can then share with others over email, etc. Very often you don’t want to just share a link to a document online.
NetDocs was an effort in 2000/2001 that is sometimes characterized as a web productivity suite. There was an internal battle between the Netdocs and Office groups, and Office won.
They did, it was called Office Online with Word, PowerPoint, Excel and SkyDrive (later OneDrive). Everything got moved under the Office 365 umbrella because selling B2B cloud packages (with Sharepoint, Azure AD, Power BI, Teams, Power Automate) was more lucrative than selling B2C subscriptions.
Interesting how it seems like MS may have been right this time? They were able to milk Office for years, and despite seeming like it might, Google didn't eat their lunch.
People still email word docs around. It’s nuts. Maybe Exchange is smart enough to intercept them and say “hey use this online one instead”? At least for intra-org..
I think the ability to actually email the docs around is half the value proposition. Having to always refer back to the cloud versions is annoying as hell when you're not actually collaborating, just showing someone a thing.
Plus it's point in time - I'm sending you the document as it is now, and I might start cutting it about or changing it after to send to someone else, but this the version I want to send you.
A product requires commitment, it requires grind. That 10% is the most critical one, and Google persistently refuses to push products across the finish line, just giving up on them and adding to the infamous Google Product Graveyard.
Honestly, what is the point? They could just maintain the core search/ads and not pay billions of dollars for tens of thousands of expensive engineers who have to go through a bullshit interview process and achieve nothing.
If they tried to focus on ads, then they wouldn’t have the talent to support the business. They probably don’t need 17 chat apps - but they can’t start saying no without having other problems.
While it is crazy, it's not too surprising. Google has become as notorious for product ineptitude as they have been for technical prowess. Dominating the fundamental research for GenAI but face planting on the resulting consumer products is right in line with the company that built Stadia, GMail/Inbox, and 17 different chat apps.
tech was based on an acquired company, Google just abused their search monopoly to make it more popular(same thing they did with YT). This has been the strategy for every service they've ever made, Google really hasn't launched a decent in-house product since Gmail and even that was grown using their search monopoly as free advertising
>Google Docs originated from Writely, a web-based word processor created by the software company Upstartle and launched in August 2005
Sorry if this was a joke and I didn't spot it. Chrome was based on WebKit which was itself based on KHTML if memory serves. Chromebooks are based on a version of that outside engine running on top of Linux which they also didn't create.
It's not a joke. Just because they didn't write everything from scratch (Chromebooks also are made with hard disks that Google didn't create from directly mining raw materials and performing all intermediate manufacturing stages) doesn't mean they haven't released successful products that they didn't just buy in.
They used the KDE-derived HTML renderer, sure, but they wrote the whole Javascript runtime from scratch, which was what gave it the speed they used as a selling point.
Nah. Safari did plenty of monopoly abuse and sneaking into installs, but still never got big on Windows. At some point the user experience does matter.
Chromebooks are worse version of the netbooks from 2008, which ran an actual desktop OS. Chromebooks are OLPCs for the rich world, designed with vendor lock-in built in. They eventually end up at discount wholesale lots if not landfills because how quickly they go obsolete.
This is like critiquing Disney for putting out garbage and then defending them because dummies keep giving them money regardless of quality. Having standards and expectations of greatness is a good thing and the last thing you want is for mediocrity to become acceptable in society.
> People are forgetting Google is the most profitable AI company in the world right now. All of their products use ML and AI.
> So who is losing?
The people who use their products, which are worse than they’ve been in decades? The people who make the content Google now displays without attribution on search results?
Netscape had a feature called LiveConnect that allowed interaction between Java and JavaScript. See http://medialab.di.unipi.it/web/doc/JavaScriptGuide/livecon.... for some examples of how it worked. Even though AJAX wasn't available yet in 1998, I think you could have used LiveConnect to achieve the same thing. Java applets had the ability to make HTTP requests to the originating host (the host that served the applet to the browser).
I agreed until the last bit. Waymo is making continuous progress and is years ahead of everyone else. Tesla is not catching up and won't beat anyone. Tesla plateaued years ago and has no clue how to improve further. Their Partial Self Driving app has never been anywhere near reliable.
Google Workspace works through resellers, they train less people, and those people give the customer support instead. IMO Google's bad reputation comes from their public customer support.
If you want the kind of support that, when there is a fault with the product, can get the fault fixed - then unfortunately Google Workspace's support is also trash.
Good if you want someone else to google the error message for you though.
> IMO Google's bad reputation comes from their public customer support.
Garbage in = garbage out.
If Google cannot deign to assign internal resources and staffing towards providing first-party support for paid products, it's not a good choice over the competition. You're not going to beat the incumbent (Office 365) by skimping on customer service.
You mean 1990s? I don't think Word and Excel even existed until the late 80s, and nobody[0] used them until Windows 3.1.
[0] yes, not literally nobody. I know about the Windows 2.0 Excel or whatever, but the user base compared to WordPerfect or 1-2-3 was tiny up until MS was able to start driving them out by leveraging Windows in the early-mid 90s.
It's reassuring that the biggest tech company doesn't automatically make the best tech. If it were guaranteed that Google's resources would automatically trump any startup in the AI field, then it would likely predict a guaranteed dominance of incumbents and consolidation of power in the AI space.
Isn't it always easier to learn from others' mistakes?
Google has the problem that it's typically the first to encounter a problem, and it has the resources to approach it (from search), but the incentive to monetize it (to get away from depending entirely on search revenue). And, management.
I don't know if that really excuses Google in this case because it's a productization problem. Google never tried to release a ChatGPT competitor until after OpenAI had. OpenAI has been wildly successful as the first mover, despite having to blaze some new product trails. Even after months of watching them and with near-infinite resources, Google is still struggling to catch up.
Outside of outliers like gmail, Google didn’t get their success with product. The organization is set up for engineering to carry the day, funded by search.
An AI product that makes search irrelevant is an existential threat, but I don’t think Google has the product DNA to pull off a replacement product for search themselves. I heard Google has been taken over by more business / management types, but it is still missing product as a core pillar.
Considerng the number of messaging apps they tried to launch, if there's at least one thing that can be concluded, it's that it isn't easier to learn from their own mistakes.
I could see that in the coming years the value of Waymo for Google is not actually in collecting revenue from transportation fees but to collect multi modal data to feed into its models.
The amount of data that is collected by these cars is massive.
None of that matters. They'll still make heaps of profit long into the future unless someone beats them in Search or Ads.
AI is a threat there, but it'd require an AI company to transform the culture of Internet use to stop people 'Googling', and that will require two things: something significantly better than Google Search that's worth switching to, and a company that is willing to reject whatever offer Google makes to buy it. Neither is very likely.
I would love to see internal data on volume of search at google. Depending on the interpretation of them chatGPT can meet both of your requirements. Personally, I still search instead of chatGPT mostly, but I have seen other users chatGPT more and more.
Also "interesting" to see the if results being SEO spam generated using AI will keep seo search viable.
Nadella is as much of an MBA type as Pichai. Their education and career paths are incredibly similar.
The difference is Nadella is a good CEO and Pichai isn’t.
Part of it could also be a result of circumstance. Nadella came at a time when MS was foundering and he had to make what appeared to be fairly obvious decisions (pivot to cloud…he was literally picked because of this, and reducing dependence on Windows…which was an obvious necessary step for the pivot to cloud). Pichai OTOH was selected to run Google when it was already doing pretty well. His biggest mandate was likely to not upset the Apple cart.
If roles were reversed, I suspect Nadella would still have been more successful than Pichai, but you never know. I’d Nadella introduction to the CEO job was to keep things going as they were, and Pichai’s was to change the entire direction of the company, maybe a decade later Pichai would have been the aggressive decision maker whereas Nadella would have been the overly cautious guy making canned demos.
>>Google Docs created in 2006! Microsoft is eating their lunch.
Of all the things, this.
I use both Google and Microsoft office products. One thing that strikes you is just how feature rich Microsoft products are.
Google doesn't look like is serious about making money.
I squarely blame rockstar product managers and OKRs for this. Not everything can be a 1000% profitable product built in the next quarter. A lot of things require small continuous improvement and care over years.
Microsoft’s killer product is Excel. I didn’t realize how powerful it was until I saw an expert use it. There are entire billion dollar organisations that would collapse without Excel.
Engineer-driven company. Not enough top-down direction on the products. Too much self-perceived moral high ground. But lately they've been changing this.
Under Eric Schmidt they were engineer-driven, during the golden era of the 2000s. Nowadays they're MBA driven, which is why they had 4 different messaging apps from different product managers.
Lack of top-down direction is what allowed that situation. Microsoft is MBA-driven and usually has a coherent product lineup, including messaging.
Also, "had." Google cleaned things up. They still sometimes do stuff just cause, but it's a lot less now. I still feel like Meet using laggy VP9 (vs H.264 like everyone else) is entirely due to engineer stubbornness.
I would say that Microsoft's craziness around buying Kin and Nokia, and Windows 8, RT edition, etc etc, was far more fundamental product misdirection than anything Google has ever done.
Microsoft failed to enter the mobile space, yeah. Google fumbled with the Nexus stuff, even though they succeeded with the Android software. But bigger picture, Microsoft was still able to diversify their revenue sources a lot while Google failed to do so.
That's true, although Pixel seems good as a successor, but the big thing Microsoft did was use what they had to get into new markets.
Procuring Azure is a good option for lots of companies because most companies' IT staff know AD and Microsoft in general, and Microsoft's cloud offers them a way to use the same (well, not the same, but it's too late by then) tools to manage their company IT.
I'm not disagreeing with its success, but I do think they had a much simpler journey, as to my understanding a lot of it involved cloudifying their locked-in enterprise customers, rather than diversifying into new markets.
What frustrates me about Google is they fumbled in a lot of markets that aren't far from their established ones. Zoom ate their lunch with video chat, and now MS Teams seems to be beating GSuite. Maybe YouTube -> social networking would've been doable, but they botched it with G+. The old Google was only good at facing new technical challenges, not making products. Now that's changing, and I think at least they can make Google Cloud work.
I also don't see anything big Google has leveraged Android for, besides Pixel, which is actually more to cement Android cause they know they don't have enough control with software alone. At least I have decent amount of faith in them pulling that off.
20 versions of .net is wonderful. Changing the names of features over and over again is great too. I am also pleased that windows ten is the last version of windows.
The same Microsoft that recently brought us "New Teams" and "New Outlook" and gave us a reskinned version of the same programs but now we have it installed twice?
Those are two messaging apps regular people can actually name, unlike all of Google's messaging apps. MSN Messenger survived 13 years supposedly. Skype was also a big thing for several years MS owned it.
And I hate Teams personally, but lots of teams use it.
That distinction doesn't matter to Microsoft. Also it's funny how Google chat products once again go unmentioned... Their alternative is Chat (or idk, chat.google.com), and it's possibly even worse than Teams.
I think Google chat(s)'s issue may be lack of features and marketing, Microsoft Teams is drowning with bugs, performance issues, poor UI/UX design, etc.
I haven't used Teams enough to say, but Chat suffers from the latter things. UI keeps randomly changing in big ways, threading is confusing, there's serious lag just switching chats, takes forever to load, feature set is only on par with Slack circa 2015.
My engineer friend who work at Google would strongly disagree with this assertion. I keep hearing about all sorts of hijinks initiated by senior PMs and managers trying to build their fiefdoms.
> Google has been working on self driving longer than anyone. Tesla is catching up and will most likely beat them.
I agree with your general post but I disagree with this. Tesla's FSD is so far behind Google it's almost negligent on the part of Tesla despite having so much more data.
I can tell you exactly why. It’s because they have a separate vp and org for all these different products like search, maps, etc. none of them talk to each other and they all compete for promotions. There is no one shot caller same thing with gcp. Google does not know products.
A lot of companies have this structure. You have the Doritos line, the Pepsi line for example etc… maybe you find some common synergies but it’s not unusual.
Errr sorry what’s the innovation of google docs exactly ? Being able to write simultaneously with somebody else? Ok, so this is what it takes for a top notch docs app to exist? Microsoft been developing this product for ages, Google tried to steal the show, although had little to no experience in producing and marketing office apps…
Besides collaborative reuniting is a no feature and there is much more important stuff than this for a word processor to be useful.
Is paid MS Teams is more or less common than paid GSuite? It's hard to find stats on this. GSuite is the better product IMO, but MS has a stronger b2b reputation, and anecdotally I hear more about people using Teams.
Not to mention it integrates with Azure365, which damn near certainly the IT department has already standardized on, feels comfortable with, and has been flooded with enough propaganda to believe anything else is massively less secure. Plus Teams has tons of knobs and buttons for managing what your users do with it... and companies love managing their employees lol.
Sure, Teams is a steaming pile of crap to use day-to-day as a chat app, the search is slow and vague - and depending on policy, probably links you to messages that no longer exist in the archive lol. Oh you want to download message history? Nah gotta get an admin to do that bruh.
I'm in one nonprofit org using MS 365 and Teams, and listening to the guy behind the original decision talk about that ecosystem, I think its popularity really does come from propaganda. I was almost convinced until I actually used it... what a piece of junk. It's ugly for me and borderline unusable for our nontechnical users. I'm in charge now and considering ditching it.
The only saving grace is that members who can't deal with it are using local MS Office, which has some integrations with 365, thus making it kinda viable. But I feel like it's still a net negative.
Does anyone use paid GSuite for anything other than docs/drive/Gmail ? In all companies I've worked at, we've used GSuite exclusively for those, and used slack/discord for chat, and zoom/discord for video/meetings.
I know that MS Teams is a more full-featured product suite, but even at companies that used it, we still used Zoom for meetings.
Counterpoint: I take probably 3/4 of my meetings on Zoom and 1/4 on meet. So on any given day I'm probably doing at least 1 on meet. If I look back on any day at all the meetings with unaceptable audio lag or very degraded video quality? They are always all "meet". It is just hands-down worse when networks are unreliable.
In addition meet insists I click on the same about 4 or 5 different "Got it" feature popups every single call, and every call also insists on asking me if I want to use Duet AI to make my background look shit which just adds to annoyance.
It's a lot better than it used to be. In 2020, universities that already had GSuite (which includes Meet) still paid to put their classes on Zoom. Personally I like Zoom more today, mostly because even my high-end laptop can struggle with Meet.
If you have a problem there’s no one available to help you.
On the MS side they will literally pull an engineer who is writing the code for the product you have a problem for to help resolve the issue if you’re large enough.
The part you see in your browser isn’t the only part of the product a company has to buy. In fact, it’s not even the most expensive bit. If you see the most expensive plans for most SAAS products (ie the enterprise plans) almost the entire difference in costs is driven by support illustrating the importance and value of support.
Kinda. In 2006 they launched "Google Apps for your domain." The name quickly changed to "Google Apps" and then in 2016 it became "GSuite." In 2020 they changed the name to Google Workspace. And of course, in 2022 they tried to kick all of the free "Gsuite Legacy" users off the platform and make them pay for Google Workspace lol.
It is yet to be seen if MSFT has actually gained a benefit. Maybe from marketing perspective it has insane potential to print big bucks, but it is a bit too soon to announce that the efforts to deliver Copilot (all tools+agents) far and wide was/is successful.
We'll get a definitive answer in a few years. Til then, OpenAI benefits from the $ value from their end of products, MSFT eats the compute costs, but also gets a stock bump.
The amount of fumbles is monumental.