Ka-Pow! The Google Desktop.
A shot across the bow today! Forget Project Green, the Google Desktop search engine is here.
This is probably a relief to some Microsofties. It is to me.
Again, we won the Feature Wars of the 1980s & 90s. Come 2K we just sort of looked at each other and didn't know what to do. How do you compete with Linux? They are copying your app features into Open Source. Can't compete feature-by-feature there.
So we went and started the Next Version of Windows. And that's gone on and on. Oh, and another version of Office came out to the delight of... well, I'm not sure just who the next version of Office delighted. Outlook looked prettier and Word had a new irritating reading view feature I had to figure how to shut off. Other than that... eh.
So the relief comes in that we finally (finally!) have a worthy opponent shipping code in a feature war. We know how to win there.
While the competition will be interesting to watch, I hope that folks do take a chance to ponder as to why our environment is so strangled that focus and resolution only comes from fear of losing when the competitor is gaining ground.
12 comments:
Responses like this is why Microsoft will continue to engage in misguided efforts. I don't see why the fact Google is actually fixing our crappy OS search feature is taken as competition instead of symbiosis.
After the billions of dollars the company spent on IE (I'm including lawsuit payouts) does the fact that the Web browser most people use is named "Internet Explorer" not "Netscape Navigator" really make a multi-billion dollar difference our bottom line?
Here we go again...
-- Dare
We may have a worthy opponent, but do we have the right people working to oppose them? MSN Search is part of ... well, MSN. We bought LookOut and will integrate it with MSN Search. LookOut is cool, MSN is... well, MSN. I'm trying to think of one thing that is innovative over there.
We bought LookOut because we are morons. Neither the interface, nor the infrastructure of LookOut will make it into our offering. All we did is give a mediocre programmer a $2M check, for NOTHING!
> Google Desktop Search can help you find web pages
> you've previously seen, email you've sent or
> received, IM chats, and files on your computer
Maybe I'm in the minority here when I say this but I really don't have any value for this? Or am I missing the big picture?
you're right - there is no value - especially to us Linux desktop users, with find, grep, egrep and all the other GNU search tools at our fingertips.
Linux or windows or whatever - theres tools which helps you find your data. Maybe I need to install this damn thing and see what it really does because I just don't see the value unless you're hopelessly disorganized and/or can't master the apps which created the data in the first place.
Bah, I guess my parents would fall into the latter category....
This utility is awesome...you need to try it to realize how effective it is. I am messy as to where I keep files on my hardrive. I guess that why it works for me.
Can you grep binary data and stuff? how can you compare searching to just greping? the desktop search allows you to search data in your outlook, word docs etc.. its far more than what grep can offer...
In linux you can search with grep, find, ...
In windows you can search with find, dir /s :-P, ...
The improvement is that you can search to all your documents and access to the results in few seconds, or less. Previously it has indexed all your documents, and when it runs, it index all documents that you touch, like antivirus programs.
I am searching an app like this, google desktop, but for indexing source code files (.c, .h, .vb, .cs, .cpp, .bas, .perl, .sh, . . . ) Do you know one? Linux or Windows. I am interested on both.
"I hope that folks do take a chance to ponder as to why our environment is so strangled that focus and resolution comes from fear of losing when the competitor is gaining ground."
Well said. Years of being out in front with no apparent competition yielded what? In too many cases a series of incremental bug fixes/upgrades. Now that there's finally some competition in OS's, Office, search, browsers, MSFT starts to wake up albeit perhaps too slowly and maybe even too late. Proving that regardless of whether they were or weren't a monopoly, they certainly acted like one. BTW, like you're blog. MSFT needs to get its head out of its ass and asap or the current slowdown is going to look like the good old days and the stock with be single-digits. Embracing the future and web services vs putting the lion's share of resources into trying to maintain the past, would be a good start.
Hey Anonymous - You can use Google Desktop for searching your source code. Check out the "Larry's Any Text File" plug-in for Google Desktop: http://desktop.google.com/plugins/indexitall.html
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