On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 11:28 AM, Graydon<[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 11:08:36AM -0400, P. J. Alling scripsit: >> Hum,. so if you switch to Google's browser you'd be trading the iron >> fist for a velvet glove on the iron fist? > > Nah, ten thousand distributed fingers incorporating a variety of > task-appropriate materials. > > The real potential advantage to this is that Google has been in the OS > business for years; all their clever online stuff depends on their > having this massively distributed computing ability, and it didn't exist > so they had to build it. As a result, and *unlike* Microsoft, they > actually understand software engineering and management large projects. > (Remember that Bill wrote a basic interpreter _himself_. A righteous > accomplishment for the time, but not something that teaches you large > project management...) > > -- Graydon
Two notes, Google has never done the OS thing. Their distributed system is built on top of other's OS's (I forget whether it's Linux or FreeBSD, but the Goole clusters don't run on anything google wrote and neither will the Chrome OS, which will use a Linux kernel with a Chrome-based userspace). And MS learned large scale OS design at the feet of IBM (On OS/2) then imported a large chunk of the VMS team to do the original NT. They actually understand software engineering and management of large projects much better than Google, their issue has always been the legacy costs of their older consumer products along with sane UI design. Almost all of the real issues with Windows have been due to the compatibility requirements to Win3.x and Win95 or the braindead security defaults necessary to allow management by barely competent IT people in the mid-90's office environment. -- M. Adam Maas http://www.mawz.ca Explorations of the City Around Us. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
