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Wang Hao told me about the Google Desktop and recommend it to me before our trip to Yang Cheng Lake (my previous trip). I tried it today. After I installed it and played with it for five minutes, I said: Microsoft is in big trouble......
Google is by no doubt my most favorite company beside Microsoft. I like almost everything it gives away: The search, the Toolbar, the AdSense Program, and the Philosophy that lies behind the company (I still remember the first is, "Focus on the user and all else will follow."). It affects many of my designs of software.
Why Google Desktop is Good
I like Google Desktop because these reasons:
1. It is small. I thought the Google's crawling and indexing machine should be as big as a house but they managed to put it into a 400 KB. How can it be possible! It is just like the early ages of Microsoft - to create small DOS compared to other big name OS and easily load into any Personal Computer. Now there are too many legacy applications that a service pack has to be hundreds of megabytes.
2. It is fast. "Fast is better than slow" is another philosophy of Google. Before I find the search button of Outlook, the search result of all the documents on my computer has appeared. It is amazing.
3. Integration with web based Google search. I found the Desktop result in traditional Google Search as a new tab and as part of the search result. It is amazing. They really have some great ideas to make the life of people easier. When a company becomes big, the processes, the systematic thinking and the frameworks seem more important than a great idea.
Google is growing and I guess it will continue to grow with the new ideas and the philosophy unchanged.
Microsoft
I see the problems of becoming the top company and becoming a big company. The company is bigger and bigger. The expectation from the Wall Street is higher and higher, and the market to defense is increasing while the market to enter is sinking when most markets related to software has become a battle field....
However, the best thing in Microsoft is, it still keeps the basic ideas of creating software to helping people. People are working so hard to find enable people to work with more productivity. I see it in emails, in chat, in working with many people inside.
Microsoft is still a great company - look at how fast people embrace blogging, social software and new things in server area (with new servers coming out every year). I still love this company although I don't want it to grow bigger and become an IBM one day. But it seems it will as long as its stock is still trading at NASDAQ...
Posted by Jian Shuo Wang at October 16, 2004 10:52 PM
Copyright: You are free to redistribute this work, as long as you keep this disclaimer
and this link: http://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20041016_google_desktop.htm
Jianshuo, I did it in machining at that time,
the first PC at my work was an XT (5.1/4 floppy and 10MB harddisk, we had a DOS 3.1....!
Emagine what it took to make some useful things to work with at a machining company !
I had to do everything from scratch at that time, the only useful manual was the DOS 3.1 manual.... But it was the only thing which was easy to work with. (1982 was a long time ago...)
The top thing was IBM mainframe applications, but they claimed 400.000 a year for the software use... (not to talk of the hardware expences !)
Posted by: carsten on October 17, 2004 11:10 PMMicrosoft is hardly in trouble. When a competitor inventes a brand new idea that appeal to users, Microsoft are soon there to copy and integrate it into the next version of the OS, as we have seen with several of the most popular features of XP today (Media Player, Web Browser, MSN). Maybe sometimes "unfair", but as long as Microsoft keep producing top notch software I am still a loyal user.
Posted by: Jens Leo Malmqvist on October 18, 2004 3:45 AMSorry but "MS old and busted; Google the new hotness." Longhorn will be outdated by the time it hits the shelfs.
Posted by: Rogi on October 18, 2004 9:34 AMsomething interesting for Google and MS, in Chinese:
http://www.blogbus.com/blogbus/blog/diary.php?diaryid=444962