Microsoft at least sells real products that should be designed, produced and supported. Google sells, figuratively speaking, air, and redirects the profits to "own the world" by crushing the competition in other areas. Google undoubtedly has some decent products as well (Android, Google Workspace) but this is a drop in the ocean.
Microsoft is a company born in selling physical products. Their software used to come on floppies and CDs. Google hasn't really sold anything real their entire existence.
Microsoft has proven skills in building/launching/supporting products, and clear capabilities to cater things into the enterprise/B2B market, including customer support for all levels.
Google lacks all of this, and all their successful products the last decade were from acquisitions or leftovers from the 20% creative time era.
Now Microsoft integrates an already loved tool (that is known to have these flaws!) into their products, and is celebrated to do so.
While google somehow tries to keep the image of technical superiority up, failing to launch something again. Probably some combination of Schadenfreude and/or sincere hope of a new technical era and/or the hope that ultimately the "be evil" company falls down and makes room for innovation instead of trying monopolize the web.
I agree in general that Microsoft leaves a lot to be desired.
But Google's product track record has been abysmal lately. Based on their horrible live event today, it seems like things are not so grand behind the scenes there anymore.
Not even close to a valid comparison. When has Google gone to the lengths that Microsoft did to tie services/applications together? What indication have they shown that, even given the opportunity, they would sabotage another vendor for market share?
In thar sense Google is the Anti-Microsoft. Microsoft makes the scrappiest products but as long as they are not total failures MS is committed to them in a way that is borderline ridiculous. Google makes good products but seems to have the attention span of three year old toddler.
I don't agree with the comparison between Microsoft and Google, MS has many more successful revenue streams, whereas Google still relies on ads for ~80% of its revenues, I think Google business is not yet in danger, but maybe more fragile.
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.
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.
My main point about Microsoft vs. Google innovations is that Microsoft had reproducible products (obviously not reproducible business) but Google has irreproducible products: not in theory but in practice.
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.
Microsoft was seen as ruthlessly destroying their competition. Google is seen as innovative. Bizarre.
Google gives away a ton of free services that work. Microsoft sells people something that they have (almost) no option not to buy, and causes a near infinite stream of headaches to just about everyone (even if you don't use it yourself - how many times have you had to help out friends or relatives whose Windows installations got screwed up?).
Sure, giving stuff away may be a cheap ploy to earn goodwill, but I can truly say that Google's services have provided me with a lot of value. In the old days of Microsoft that was true for them, too, but over the past decade Microsoft products have done little more than cost me time and money.
Is it really that bizarre that I feel differently about the two companies?
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