They are currently in the #2 in the four step Gandhi scale
The famous "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" is not an authentic Gandhi quote. That is, no one has ever found any evidence that Gandhi said it. Personally, I think it's a great line, but too modern -- too sound-bitey -- to have come from Gandhi (though he was certainly capable of wit, e.g. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/will/CPP/gandhi.html).
It's common for great lines to get falsely attributed to great persons: it increases their chance of being repeated. One might call them "cuckoo quotes" since, like eggs planted in other birds' nests, they are memes planted in other people's reputations.
Edit: I love the internet. It turns out the one-liner is a paraphrase of a speech made to a clothing workers' union (presumably not by Gandhi) in 1914:
First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
Because Microsoft's monopolies are hurting competition and the evolution of our practices. We certainly don't need them pushing a new search engine through MSN Messenger or Windows updates.
Perhaps, but is Microsoft, a convicted monopoly abuser, the right challenger? Microsoft has already a powerful grip on the whole industry (why do you think multi-processors and 64-bit computing took that long to catch?) for us to feel too comfortable with them gaining more power.
Google has a monopoly on search, but Microsoft has a couple at least as valuable as Google's.
Competition between giants is a good thing. And a sense of urgency in the marketplace is good for third party companies, as it places pressure to buy rather than build.
Because Microsoft's monopolies are hurting competition and the evolution of our practices. We certainly don't need them pushing a new search engine through MSN Messenger or Windows updates.
>Because Microsoft's monopolies are hurting competition and the evolution of our practices.
What monopolies? Plenty of people use Firefox these days, some even use Chrome and Safari. Personally, I use Opera. Or perhaps you are talking about OS - well, OS X is nearing 10% market share, and (AFAIK) showing no signs of slowing down. The only real monopoly MSFT has is Office, and honestly, that's because it's far and away the best office suite. OOo is pretty good, but definitely inferior to Office.
If anyone has a monopoly on search, it's Google, to the point that "Google" has become a synonym for search. If you're really anti-monopoly rather than just anti-Microsoft, you should be rooting for Bing.
You ever wonder why there isn't any other good office apps? Is it perhaps because a several time convicted monopoly abuser is using the power granted to it by its multiple interlocking monopolies to prevent this from happening?
I'll not even get into their shenanigans with ODF and ISO but did you ever noticed that IE doesn't have a spellchecker. What a strange omission from a modern browser, unless of course you have a monopoly in the OS, the browser and Office software and can happily screw customers to maintain them.
Half of web 2.0 is built on a reverse engineered feature from IE that was only put in so that users of Exchange could have a superior "web" experience as long as they used IE and not an actual browser.
>You ever wonder why there isn't any other good office apps? Is it perhaps because a several time convicted monopoly abuser is using the power granted to it by its multiple interlocking monopolies to prevent this from happening?
Uh, no, I'm pretty sure it's because creating an office suite is a hell of a lot of work, and because Office is really pretty good, and so it doesn't make business sense for anyone to compete right now. If Office were lacking, you'd see competition. As it is, I don't think the (near) monopoly on office suites is actually hurting anyone. It's not like Microsoft isn't innovating - I've been using Office 2010 builds for a month now and it's very solid, with tons of improvements over Office 2007.
Actually, Microsoft uses Hadoop. But that's only because it recently purchased the semantic search startup Powerset. Not only is open-source slow to reach the Microsoft back-end, but so is, well, the cloud.
Actually, Microsoft's Dryad project is significantly more sophisticated than Hadoop. Using Hadoop is not exactly a compelling example of how technically sophisticated your organization is or how much you utilize "the cloud", anyway.
Of course, Google's infrastructure is great, whether MapReduce or GFS.
However, if Bing gets to a point where their search results are clearly better, then Google will be in trouble, and no amount of screaming "we have a better infrastructure!" will help. Users want the best results, and that's why Google originally won against other search engines.
I don't know if that's ever going to happen. Probably not, but I would not bet on it.
Is the talk available online or at least, is there alternative coverage? The Register conveys the message "Google thinks Microsoft infrastruture sucks", but they don't seem to understand the arguments (or at least, I can't understand their coverage without guessing a lot).
To be honest I don't think google is being entirely fair here.
Google provides me with a service. In that respect I don't care how that service is provided and on what technology that is based. It could be a giga-cluster of retrofitted Commodore 64s thrown out in orbit to save on real estate costs, kept in place by a reinforced fiber back down to Google HQ. As long as the service works, I wouldn't care less.
This gives google complete freedom in their implementation, so they pretty much built up their own infrastructure from scratch, for a very specific purpose.
Microsoft on the other side delivers software, general purpose platforms which you can deploy and build your own solutions on. Granted, they got the whole internet thing a little late, but I can't blame them for trying to exploit the technology they already posses instead of ditching it all and starting from scratch.
With Microsoft's solutions, I know I can make them do whatever I want, on pretty much any x86 hardware, and I know it will work. "Google OS", for a lack of better name, I doubt would be particularly useful for the general public.
I don't think it's surprising for a platform tailored for one specific goal to perform better than general purpose platforms in that specific area, but that hardly means that the other platform is worthless.
I understood the article to be focusing on Microsoft vs. Google in terms of their approach to the same set of challenges in the web sphere. ("Google has questioned Microsoft's entire approach to online infrastructure")
In this respect, it would seem that Google's "horizontal" infrastructure stack makes it more adept at handling web-scale problems across multiple domains (versus Microsoft's "vertical" problem-by-problem approach).
Agreed. This debate was in the context of cloud computing. After working with Google App Engine and their datastore API, I more fully appreciate the willpower required by their developers.
Some queries that would be relatively easy (and not super-scalable) have to be reformulated so computation is done on write and not on read. An example is writing an app that uses ranking and decay:
http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/overheard.html
There's a different set of tricks to learn, so in the context of cloud computing, if you aren't willing to confine your approaches to those amenable to truly distributed cloud computing, you're not addressing the basic problems. Of course, there will be apps that can work effectively without web-scale, but are you talking about the "cloud" at that point or just hosted apps?
1) they ignore you 2) they laugh at you 3) they fight you 4) you win
Let's hope they never get beyond 2.