Hi OP. Your points, as I understand them, are the following. Correct me if I'm wrong.
* MS is not a good example of a strong engineering org. Further, it is not a good example because Windows sucks.
* Google doesn't employ every smart person ever.
* Google can't actually compete. (ed note: in any field, or just against iOS and Fb?)
* My argument is like the argument that no one would supplant Windows.
* Given enough time, everything dies.
Points 2 and 3 are about Google. Let's start there. You're right that Google doesn't employ every smart person ever, but then, who said they did? :) But there are a limited number of search relevance engineers, and finding enough to keep up with Google is a monumental, and maybe insurmountable feat. If you want to compete with Google, you will need to have a serious advantage that supercedes this. That is just a fact.
Point 3 is about competition. I'll grant you that G+ is no Facebook, but Android is the most widely adopted mobile OS on the planet, and by a huge margin -- iOS is basically not even competitive, except for the top 5% of the market. Further, a billion smartphones will be bought this year, the most of which will be Internet enabled Android devices, and most of which will be bought in developing countries by people coming on the Internet for the first time. You tell me who's forward thinking there, because when that market comes online, it will be huge. The fact that you mention this as being non-competitive indicates to me that you might not know what you're talking about. :(
Point 1 is about the MS org. What can I say, OP, I work here, so maybe I'm not the best person to have this discussion with. But FWIW I chose this place over some much sexier jobs because the team I work with is arguably the best of its type in the world. There are bad neighborhoods, but the disparity between a good team in MS and a good team at Google is basically negligible. Also I think Windows is one of the great engineering feats of CS, so ... :| (Note that I still use UNIX at home.)
Point 4 is probably the result of confusion. I don't think no one can compete with Google. Bing has 20% market share! Clearly we can. But I do think it will be hard to compete with Google on search quality. I don't see how you can argue that.
And point 5 is obviously true but not relevant.
EDIT: Actually I now see your point 1 as saying "MS couldn't pull this off because they're not a good engineering org, but someone else could". Maybe someone else can build a better search engine, but I think what MS has pulled off with Bing is a monumental feat.
For starters, we built the entire Bing stack from scratch. No OSS. No common platforms like the JVM. Nothing like that. We started from nothing, and invented the server infrastructure, the data pipeline, the runtime that would support the site, the ML tools, everything. The fact that the site runs at all is a small miracle, but the site does not "just" run: the most remarkable thing by far is that the quality of our tooling is quite incredible, generally an order of magnitude better than the OSS equivalents. For example, the largest deployment of an OSS NoSQL datastore seems to be a few thousand nodes. The small NoSQL cluster backing our MapReduce implementation is stably deployed on a cluster an order of magnitude larger than this. This is something you only really see at companies like Amazon, Google, or MS.
I understand that the consumer market is not something MS is strong at, but I am hoping this gives you a taste of the scale and quality of what's happening behind the scenes. Happy to talk more about this if you drop me a line or skype me at `mrclemmer` :)
> For starters, we built the entire Bing stack from scratch. No OSS. No common platforms like the JVM. Nothing like that. We started from nothing, and invented the server infrastructure, the data pipeline, the runtime that would support the site, the ML tools, everything. The fact that the site runs at all is a small miracle, but the site does not "just" run: the most remarkable thing by far is that the quality of our tooling is quite incredible, generally an order of magnitude better than the OSS equivalents. For example, the largest deployment of an OSS NoSQL datastore seems to be a few thousand nodes. The small NoSQL cluster backing our MapReduce implementation is stably deployed on a cluster an order of magnitude larger than this. This is something you only really see at companies like Amazon, Google, or MS.
You lost me here. Not building on OSS seems like setting yourself up or failure from the start, particularly when you are fighting a manpower war, which is where OSS is beating every proprietary entity. OSS already powers Google and Amazon and OSS db's will scale to billions of nodes, not a few thousand.
For starters, we built the entire Bing stack from scratch. No OSS. No common platforms like the JVM. Nothing like that. We started from nothing, and invented the server infrastructure, the data pipeline, the runtime that would support the site, the ML tools, everything.
Wasn't much of the Bing stack built off Powerset, whose core technology was licensed from Xerox PARC?
For the time I was working there I'm quite sure most of the tools were internally made by MS:
- they had their own map reduce
- they had their own service deployment and management system
- their own db and nosql
- etc...
about the search and relevance they are updated quite fast, sometimes with big code replacement. This means that even if powerset tech was used as a start (and I do think it was not, it was possibly adapted and integrated -- i believe the base code was msn/live) it is now changed in most of its pieces.
>Windows is one of the great engineering feats of CS
Do I have to point out all the lame exploits and bugs which take so long to get fixed, the terrible design, the "things which should have been there years ago but we still don't have" like a decent file manager, task manager, copy utility? And AFAIK Windows made few major contribution to the theory of OSs (semaphores, threads, paging, scheduling and so on) so there's really nothing to be amazed at.
I'll spare you my opinions on Bing. Reinventing the wheel is not worth describing, no matter how beautiful that wheel is, although I'm happy for you to be a part of the team making that wheel. If only Bing had more ambition than just being a clone of Google Search, some people under 70 would actually consider migrating. But if you're happy with your default-search-engine-bundled-with-IE market share at 20%, good for you (eh, it does bring a lot of ad money). You may not call the shots at MS, but you can at least admit all the shortcomings.
You could point out all the lame exploits and bugs, but only if you want to spark a long argument that you will end up losing. There are a variety of things I don't like about Windows, and I avoid using it. But the idea that it's somehow less secure than other operating systems is for the most part a Linux advocacy myth. The fundamental security architecture of WinAPI is just not that different from that of Linux or OS X (which also has a legacy compat issue that complicates its security).
Fair enough, you know much more than me in that domain. :)
Are you going to argue about the famous general instability of Windows compared to its large competitors though? It seems like a good indicator of bad design in low level implementations.
What do you mean by famous general instability of Windows? Windows is perhaps my 3rd choice for OS, but almost all my clients use Windows and among the problems they deal with, instability is not one of them.
Hey devcpp, let me see if I have your points right.
* Windows actually sucks.
* Reinventing the wheel is not worth talking about no matter what.
* Bing sucks.
* I should admit the shortcomings of MS.
Regarding the last point, I'm kind of shocked that you think I'm a shill. I feel like I've been pretty honest about my feelings.
re: Windows sucks, that's sort of OT, but if you want to have the discussion, drop me a line. clemmer.alexander@gmail.com
re: Bing sucks, I don't see what your point about market share or unoriginality is, I already conceded that we have a lot of work to do with search relevance. I'm sort of annoyed about the negativity of your post, as from my perspective I've been pretty candid about what I think our strengths and weaknesses are. :(
re: reinventing the wheel, I don't think this is going to be something that we agree on. The way in which engineers here pull together and simply build what needs to be built is nothing short of breathtaking. I don't see how building, e.g., Cosmos shouldn't be considered an accomplishment. Should Amazon's Dynamo? What about Yahoo's Hadoop? What about anything in OSS, for that matter? I think you're not being fair here.
Not the OP - but I think you miss the relevance of point 5. Tech is littered with the irrelevant remnants and skeletons of "giant unstoppable forces". Look at Sun - in the 90s they were unbeatable, by 2004 they were quickly growing irrelevant. Oracle seems to be on the way out. Cisco too - they haven't done much exciting in a while, in a lot of circles they are viewed as the company holding networking back.
Other companies no one could unseat:
* DEC
* Xerox
* Apple (a couple of times)
* Corel
* Lotus
* IBM (a couple times in a couple fields)
* And on and on.
The point is that given a bit of time, Google will mess up, someone will come up with some new tech, and/or google will implode under it's own crushing weight.
I'm responding to the fact that OP claims MS is not a good engineering firm. I don't think that point is arguable. We are not just good, we are among the very best in the world in terms of engineering achievements.
Of course, whether we survive is another question entirely! I did not speculate on this, nor would I. Who knows what the future holds, we've just this year basically bet the company on some fairly risky things.
That said, I'm all for hating on large corporations, but the idea that Cisco and Oracle -- literally the market leaders in their respective domains -- are "on their way out" because they don't innovate fast enough is not a very convincing argument. :( Precisely who poses them an existential threat at this point? I see no one at all.
* MS is not a good example of a strong engineering org. Further, it is not a good example because Windows sucks.
* Google doesn't employ every smart person ever.
* Google can't actually compete. (ed note: in any field, or just against iOS and Fb?)
* My argument is like the argument that no one would supplant Windows.
* Given enough time, everything dies.
Points 2 and 3 are about Google. Let's start there. You're right that Google doesn't employ every smart person ever, but then, who said they did? :) But there are a limited number of search relevance engineers, and finding enough to keep up with Google is a monumental, and maybe insurmountable feat. If you want to compete with Google, you will need to have a serious advantage that supercedes this. That is just a fact.
Point 3 is about competition. I'll grant you that G+ is no Facebook, but Android is the most widely adopted mobile OS on the planet, and by a huge margin -- iOS is basically not even competitive, except for the top 5% of the market. Further, a billion smartphones will be bought this year, the most of which will be Internet enabled Android devices, and most of which will be bought in developing countries by people coming on the Internet for the first time. You tell me who's forward thinking there, because when that market comes online, it will be huge. The fact that you mention this as being non-competitive indicates to me that you might not know what you're talking about. :(
Point 1 is about the MS org. What can I say, OP, I work here, so maybe I'm not the best person to have this discussion with. But FWIW I chose this place over some much sexier jobs because the team I work with is arguably the best of its type in the world. There are bad neighborhoods, but the disparity between a good team in MS and a good team at Google is basically negligible. Also I think Windows is one of the great engineering feats of CS, so ... :| (Note that I still use UNIX at home.)
Point 4 is probably the result of confusion. I don't think no one can compete with Google. Bing has 20% market share! Clearly we can. But I do think it will be hard to compete with Google on search quality. I don't see how you can argue that.
And point 5 is obviously true but not relevant.
EDIT: Actually I now see your point 1 as saying "MS couldn't pull this off because they're not a good engineering org, but someone else could". Maybe someone else can build a better search engine, but I think what MS has pulled off with Bing is a monumental feat.
For starters, we built the entire Bing stack from scratch. No OSS. No common platforms like the JVM. Nothing like that. We started from nothing, and invented the server infrastructure, the data pipeline, the runtime that would support the site, the ML tools, everything. The fact that the site runs at all is a small miracle, but the site does not "just" run: the most remarkable thing by far is that the quality of our tooling is quite incredible, generally an order of magnitude better than the OSS equivalents. For example, the largest deployment of an OSS NoSQL datastore seems to be a few thousand nodes. The small NoSQL cluster backing our MapReduce implementation is stably deployed on a cluster an order of magnitude larger than this. This is something you only really see at companies like Amazon, Google, or MS.
I understand that the consumer market is not something MS is strong at, but I am hoping this gives you a taste of the scale and quality of what's happening behind the scenes. Happy to talk more about this if you drop me a line or skype me at `mrclemmer` :)