Google has built lots of services in the last 5 years, but it has killed them few months after. Instead Microsoft has bought lots of services (GitHub, Skype), but also some stuff that Microsoft has built from scratch hasn’t been very successful, like Cortana or windows for ARM.
How is Google in a Microsoft position? Ballmer made wasteful acquisitions like Skype and Nokia, and wasted 3 years trying to compete with the iOS by building 2 separate ARM operating system (Windows RT, Windows Phone) only to kill them both and revert focus to the x86 Surface line.
Google hasn't done antything like that. Their product discontinuations have mostly been for niche applications.
Google was built from the ground up writing software for itself to run. Microsoft made systems and development tools for customers to run. Google has to make a much larger cultural change to turn their monolithic infrastructure inside out into products, whereas Microsoft had to make a change in the reverse direction to try to compete in Internet/cloud services.
It's not the same because Google's products are all (or at least mostly?) services, whereas many of the Microsoft products listed are simple releases with no continuing support required for them to still work (e.g. 3D Movie Maker).
"Killed" (can't use it anymore), vs. "Discontinued" (might stop working on new operating systems at some point in the future).
There's plenty to criticize in Google, but this idea that MS is suddenly so much better is absurd, in my opinion.
Microsoft open sourced .NET. Meanwhile, Google... open sourced Android, Chromium (including V8), Tensorflow, Go, Dart, Angular, Kubernetes, and literally hundreds of other projects. They also fund Let's Encrypt and contributions to third-party OSS projects on their annual Summer of Code.
Interesting take and I have to say I agree with it. Microsoft recent (1-2 years) moves have been pretty exciting and are coming to fruition. Google hasn't excited me in a while and the last few times they have the results have been less that stellar (Glass, Google Plus, Wear). It's great to see MS buy startups and keep them alive. Much more interesting to me than Google's purchase and kill strategy. e.g. MS bought Acompli, rebranded, and have a great mobile email solution. Google bought Sparrow (at the time the best mobile and desktop Gmail solution), killed it and didn't come out with anything better.
At its core, Microsoft is a business software company: they live and die by big businesses being willing to pay for their software and services. Meanwhile, google lives and dies by advertising. They’ve attempted to diversify into other revenue streams, but nothing else can compete.
You make it sound like Google is the only company to EOL underperforming products and services. How many products and services has Apple or Microsoft abandoned or shut down during their span? I'm guessing that list is very long.
Does anyone support financially unsuccessful products? I think Google gets a bad rap because a) it can kill products with large amounts of users that still aren't valuable enough to the bottom line or company strategy, and b) it can't seem to focus behind one way to solve a problem. Whereas we don't knock hardware companies as much, because the thing has a finite lifespan and more or less continues to work for its useful life.
Windows RT — were there any users to miss it? I loved Windows Phone, but I was surprised Microsoft didn't kill it sooner.
It's interesting how Microsoft is starting to feel like the lesser evil compared to Google. I wonder how many good services/companies have been killed by Google offering an inferior service for free, only to abandon the service later on.
Google is a one shot wonder with search engine and ads as their 90+ revenue engine. Microsoft has been doing Enterprise and Devtools for decades. Google also has a habit of abandoning things without any warning. I can’t trust them with my life’s worth of code.
Google still has it's own platforms. If we take a look at last generation consumer AI's, voice assistants, Google definitely beat Microsoft, and not only because Cortana sucked.
Microsoft may dominate the AI market for office stuff soon, but for general purpose language models Google still has a great shot, especially when it comes to mobile platforms
Microsoft hasn't killed many online services, and besides Azure doesn't have dominant control of the internet like Google does. MS kills support for old box products and hardware devices, but that doesn't mean you can't still use them! (Also, what would we even kill? Bing? MSN?)
When Google pulls the plug on Nest, they burn an entire ecosystem, and piss off the people they should be working with on IoT. It's really stupid strategy.
Google and Microsoft, the beginning of the end of so many products and services. Both just implement whatever will currently make them the most profit, they suck at it and don't care because they're still raking in money. It's sad. At some point both were actually decent companies (setting aside "evil" they did) but now adays both are just shells of that capitalizing on their names still.
Rather uninteresting article. Microsoft still has a lot to do before becoming relevant again, and Google has to lose a lot before spiraling out of control.
That doesn't mean Microsoft isn't doing well. Their recent announcements and PR has been great (something they've always been good at). Microsoft just still has a big hill to climb
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