Dudu Mimran Blog

The web is changing

I have been reading about the whereabouts of News Corp., Google and Microsoft in recent two weeks and I noticed something weird happening here about but could not put my finger on it. To those who do not know the storyline here is a short description posted on Hitwise today:

Two weeks ago we posted on Rupert Murdoch's threat to block Google from Indexing News Corp. content. While at first it seemed as though Murdoch was merely posturing with hypotheticals, reports continue to indicate that News Corp. is seriously considering choosing Bing as the exclusive "indexer" of their news content.

via weblogs.hitwise.com

At first I thought Mr. Murdoch was playing tricks on Google but when Microsoft entered the picture with their proposal to News Corp. to exclusively allow indexing of their sites on Bing only things got clearer. I am not talking about the not surprising tactic from Microsoft's arsenal but on a total different thing.

The new phenomena here is the change of balance between publishers and Google. The status que until today was that everyone just wished Google would index their websites and the more the merrier. Indexing meant traffic which summed up to more revenues from advertising. Industries has been created on this raw desire to be indexed on Google, for example SEO and SEM were millions of dollars have been poured into it. News Corp. as a big website with big assets understood that Google is no less important to them then the opposite.

I am not sure whether Bill Gates got it and talked to News Corp or the other way around (though it smells like Bill's way of thinking) but something has changed here.

Now that this has happened we can contemplate on few directions. For example what will happen if other websites will follow through and will deindex themselves from Google? And also is this happening because Google is no longer the main hub for getting users to websites where social bookmarking and tiny urls on twitter fill the gap? Is this the reason Google is developing operating systems to grab hold on users while they know they loose ground in the pure web market?

I think this is a serious topic for Google to think on.

Dudu

Thoughts on application development and setup in windows vs. linux

After many long years of development to both MS Windows platforms and Linux platforms and especially lots of frustration in recent days trying to install/uninstall software on my WinXP to solve a problem I have few conclusions on proprietary vs. open source development.

One of the nice things about development in Microsoft world (or at least seems so until you get into trouble) is that everything wraps up so nicely as if you were in a candy store. There are very nice tools for development and there sophisticated mechanisms for code reuse such as DLLs and libraries as well as well documented APIs and examples. Microsoft as a sole owner of the MS Windows platform has created a complete eco-system of dev tools to enable you as a developer to rapidly develop your own applications. One simple MS-Windows application usually relies on many, many dependencies such as other products installed/service packs/specific operating systems/DLLs and actually when you wrap your application as a setup package you usually rely on these to exist in the target computer and to be (hopefully) compliant with your specific application requirements. To package all dependencies into your application is not relevant and some do package unique extensions that are required but most just deliver their own app relying on Microsoft to handle dependencies.

This mechanism works very nice in a controlled environment world where you fully control the setup of your test machines but once you go into the wild where the variety of combinations of configurations are enormous, things usually break. Especially after few install/uninstalls of few apps where each one leaves its trails of broken dependencies. Actually as I see it a MS-Windows PC that has received a normal "dosage" of installs/uninstalls becomes actually chaotic in terms of what is actually residing in it. Here the lack of awareness to what your application actually needs and depends on works to your worst.

On Linux/Open Source world when you develop you usually know what you are depending on and the approach is more minimalistic in terms of depending on too many components to already reside on the target computer unless it is a specific runtime platform like perl or python. This approach makes your dev/packaging process seem at first more "dirty" and requires hands-on experience but the end result is a way more stable deployment then what you could achieve in MS World. Usually install/uninstall of software on Linux does not affect the rest of the system and the instructions on how to make your software work can become very clear. This is attributed to the way Linux and open source in general has been developed by different independent minds who found an effective integration approach unlike MS "integrative" one.

I am not sure whether it is MS goal to achieve perfect automatic/transparent platform but still eventually the more hand-on approach seem to work better. This opens up some thoughts on APP store like approaches for iPhone for example where there a similar simplistic approach to handle deployment automatically is being taken. Currently in the App store frontier with the low amount of software packages and low complexity of available apps nowadays the problem does not seem to exist but still time will tell how it will deal with complexity similar to MS variety.

That is also why people like web apps a lot where no "apparent" setup happens though this environment goes also through changes that make it "stickier" to te target platform such as Google Gears and native code implementations.  Actually within browsers the setup happens on demand and new code deployment happens automatically where dependencies are minor since the browser separates automatically dependencies between domains.

Google knocks out Microsoft silently

Today goog announced the release of a research technology called Native Code which is just another step in making the browser the real operating system. Native Code enables web developers (if you can keep calling them this way after this release at all) to develop code that will run native on the user's pc as if it was an installed application where all the computer resources are available.

Microsoft, who lost the browser battle (just recently Steve Ballmer announced that they will consider the open source webkit as a rendering engine for IE, hence death for the proprietary IE), will find out pretty soon that the browser can provide developers no less development platform then Microsoft Windows. With this native code and Google Chrome process architecture basically you can develop everything. You just don't need to install it and even more then that, you don't need to buy MS Windows in order to enjoy it since it is cross platform by nature.

The future where browsers will be actually the only software to be installed on the device you own looks very interesting: Delivery of all software will be changed profoundly were not only the web applications we know today will be easilly accessible but actually every functionality you desire will be there. It sounds to be similar to the way app stores/marketplaces work today with one big boost!

I saw also last week a post on Techmeme saying that Google might have a secret OS and I personally don't think they do it secretly, they actually do it very open and with pride, they just do it step by step without coming out with big declarations.

Microsoft Ballmer dismisses Android

I found today a news on Cnet titled Ballmer dismisses Google Android where the content of the news item is clearly described in its title. This kind of titles always attract to read further since usually when Microsoft dismisses something, I believe that something has a great future. It is amazing that Microsoft's CEO still holds the same position of disregarding things he does not understand (and his own words - "I don't really understand their strategy. Maybe somebody else does."). As far as I remember the last time he did not understand what Google does with search, that was the day he lost the battle on the search field.

Later on there is also another "funny" quote of him in regards to Google and here it is - "If I went to my shareholder meeting, my analyst meeting, and said, 'hey, we've just launched a new product that has no revenue model!'...I'm not sure that my investors would take that very well. But that's kind of what Google's telling their investors about Android," - again, if he would raise his head, he would that most of the things google does are free so why does he think their shareholders would be surprised or non supportive. he might be reflecting his own shareholders attitude where they are use to revenue based product and that is actually where they fall short.

As for Android (although my case above relates to anything Microsoft dismisses in vanity)  did he maybe think, it can be their alternative OS for MS Windows with one difference - free. I know it is for mobile devices right now and a bit limited, but well, all devices are becoming mobile and given enough time it will have a laptop version as well.

Dudu

What does Google Browser means to me?

Google having their own browser is a move I did not anticipate and is actually a brilliant idea in terms of os replacement for other proprietary operating systems, hence microsoft. I think it will actually be very successfull for two reasons:

- being open source

- being powered by a web state of mind (and no one is such as google is)

The fact it is open source I think means a killer for IE since having one propietary browser and one open source (mozilla) is one thing. Having two major players with open source browser and one propietary means the propietary is bad.

As for myself, I think it means a big change in terms of web based application and their bright future to become the dominant development platform for new products and services. I find it hard to rationalize now developing platform specific applications while the ability to cross platform them is so easy.

Anyway, I am very glad on this. As for chrome, I played with that a bit this morning and after a while it stuck my laptop but I guess this is only early stage problems.

Dudu