Google/Microsoft Wars

If you havn’t spotted it yet, there’s a new feature to the Google Personalized Home Page. It’s with a twist. The themes change depending on the time of day. Its a great addition to Google Personalized Home. The P.H is yet another Google inititive to become the start page of the internet. Themes just make it better.

I think the Microsoft/Google wars are limited to the internet.

The Wars arn’t really about the internet. The Wars are more about who influences the user more. If Microsoft got its collective act together and pored the same zest and energy it’s used up fighting Google into its proven, core product lines of Windows and Windows Servers, there is no doubt that we’d have a kick-ass OS that has people queueing up to buy. Microsoft need to desperately concentrate on the bread-and-butter of its business. I’m not suggesting that Microsoft will suddenly disappear in a Kansas Tornado. Niether will Google. But surely its better to get the job done right the first time.

On the other hand, I’m not suggesting that Microsoft give up, far from it. I’m suggesting that greater priority be given to the Windows OS. Micrsoft has many winning products out there – look at the 360 for one. 

Look at Google as an example. Google have always leveraged thier core product : Search. All their features have search at their core. Why? Google are the class of the world when it comes to search. Why waste that? Google are not diversifng into OS’s or games- they are completely focused on their core product: Search. What do we, the consumers, get? A kick-ass search engine.

While Microsoft’s  Web effort is valiant, laudable and brave, catching up with Google seems a bit too far fetched even for viewers of  the Sci-Fi channel. In short: Its a fine line between fighting a battle and, fighting a losing battle.

Building the Back-End

If no one has read the Ask the Wizard blog, don’t worry – I subscribed only yesterday. Although this is mainly a business post focussing on how building the back end of a service gives you more flexibility in the products that go live, I see a great many parellels with software development.

Much more simple to understand the FeedBurner example. We didn’t spend the first five months building those two services we rolled out in February. We spent the first five months building out the architecture for feed filtering and feed processing such that we could quickly deploy any new feed service we decided to build, and then we spent about a week building out those first two services. Yes, it was true that somebody could have built a competitor to what we launched in a weekend. However, we would be able to quickly iterate and innovate on top of our release, whereas the built-in-a-weekend competitor would have to keep building one-off services that would eventually either become untenable or require an incredibly long period of underlying architecture refactoring while we continued to innovate.

In software development, you can get right in there and do your bit. But thats all that your software does. If you spend the time creating a framework that supports the code that you later write, then its so much easier to add features and services becuase the framework has already been build and all the really complex stuff goes on under the bonnet. I supose it comes down to the adage: build it right the first time.