Bruner Blog

There is a fascinating cover story in Fortune this week titled “Why Google Scares Gates.” Unfortunately, the piece on the web only features the intro, after which you have to be a paid subscriber to read the rest. I read it in the print edition.

But just how scared Gates is was clear when I heard an NPR interview with him Friday morning.

Now, I’m not one of these people who hates Gates or Microsoft just because they’re more powerful than the White House. I recovered from the cult of Macintosh years ago, and while I use Firefox, it’s just because it’s better and less prone to spyware and viruses than IE. I happen to think MS Excel is one of the most amazing pieces of software on the planet, and I honestly like Windows better than the Mac OS for reasons I won’t get into. Anyway, suffice it to say, I don’t have a dog in this fight.

I think Gates is smart as hell and his philanthropy is inspiring and I don’t begrudge his shrewd business practices. But after reading/hearing these two pieces, I think Fortune’s right: he may have met his match. Or at least, he’s clearly rattled.

First, a couple of excerpts from the Fortune piece provide some perspective. On the cover, Gates is quoted as saying, “They are more like us than anyone else we have ever competed with,” by which he means that he believes Google is more interested in pursuing productivity software than just search.

Further on, the story describes that Microsoft’s advantage has always been that it could ride hurt herd on any competitor, irrespective of whether the competitor had better software or not, thanks to Microsoft’s control of the desktop as the ultimate distribution advantage. Netscape’s original model was to sell its software for $30 a pop. Microsoft simply integrated its browser into features in the OS and its productivity tools suite and gave the browser away for free, and Netscape was left sucking wind. Similarly, Lotus 123 and Word Perfect couldn’t compete against the leverage of Microsoft’s operating system.

But Google doesn’t rely on the OS. And it is free to users. Microsoft can set MSN as the browser homepage default, but Google is so much better and the barrier to switch to Google is so low that Microsoft can’t wield its traditional platform advantage. Chillingly, a former Microsoft executive says in the Fortune piece, “Microsoft can play its old game to compete with Linux and Apple. It has to play Google’s game to compete with Google.”

Now, consider this seemingly innocuous exchange in the NPR piece. Talking about the familiar complaint among tech companies that there aren’t enough qualified programmers coming out of U.S. universities, the NPR reporter asks Gates, “Are you saying you have an Indian campus and a Chinese campus because there just aren’t enough good brains here available?” and Gates answers, in part, “We would have done some work in those markets irregardless.”

Devotees of my recently retired Nazi Spelling Points program should be quick to note that “irregardless” isn’t an actual word. It’s a common mistake when sloppy speakers are confusing “regardless” or “irrespective.” (Olivier once had the gall (or should I say Gaul?) to accuse me of making this mistake, while the ungrateful foreigner was sleeping in my apartment on a trip to NY. But ignore him; I would never make that mistake.)

There are a couple of delicious ironies in Gates’s misuse of this word. First, the college drop-out is in the midst of complaining that the U.S., which has the highest per capita college graduation rate of any country in the world (save perhaps Cuba), doesn’t have enough people trained in the sciences, but while they’re all apparently graduating in liberal arts degrees, he’s demonstrating a woeful literary accomplishment on par with, say, our president. The second irony I’m working up to.

Here’s another passage from the Fortune article:

Gates says that when Microsoft is done integrating search into future versions of Windows and Office, the world will look back at the way we are now “Googling” for stuff on the Internet and laugh. “The idea that you type in these words [in the search box] that aren’t sentences and you don’t get any answers—you just get back all these things you have to click on—that is so antiquated,” he says, later adding, “We need to take search way beyond how people think of it today and just have it be naturally available, based on the task they want to do.” For example, if you wanted to look up a factoid while you were writing a document, you might search for it without ever leaving Word.

God help us. When I first read this, I thought it was idiotic. When I heard him make essentially the same point in the NPR piece, I realized that he’s desperate, that Microsoft is desperate, and that this insane theory is the best PR spin they have and they’re flogging it to any journalist that will listen. Towards what end, I don’t know. The recently released version of MSN’s new search tool is hardly any improvement over the current state of search, the standard for which remains Google. And while I firmly believe all of the players in the space still have a long way to go before the functionality of Internet search lives up to anything like its true potential, there is no doubt that Google is kicking everyone else’s asses when it comes to innovation.

The idea, however, that I’m going to be writing something in Word and, wanting a “factoid,” I’m simply going to trust Word to magically provide me with the right answer is horrifying. As a professional researcher and former journalist, I understand that context is everything. I simply can’t see a world where I’m not going to want to click through to the various sources that offer an answer to my query so I can compare one to another, read full paragraphs to make sure this is the answer to the same question I’m actually asking and get a sense of whether the source of this information is the U.S. Census Bureau, the New York Times, or JoesHouseOfCrazyConspiracyTheories.com.

It’s like he doesn’t even understand the basic premise of the Internet. Read Small Pieces Loosely Joined, for God sake. It is beautiful because it’s the most amazing network of information in the world. You can’t centralize it and sanitize it and package it into a single piece of damn software that reads my mind, you wrinkly old fool.

Anyone who has used a spell checker and realized it can’t tell the difference between “its” and “it’s” knows what I’m talking about, much less Word’s hilarious grammar suggestions. So, I’m supposed to stop “Googling” and just trust Word and Windows to always know the right answer to my every question? This from a man who uses “irregardless” unironically?

No, I think it’s more likely that in the future we will Google “Microsoft” and laugh at how antiquated that seems.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2005 at 1:08 am and is filed under aa-home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.