Tech News Roundup – 7/2/08
I was reading TheRegister.co.uk today during dinner and had a few comments to the articles:
Google A Broken Hell for Five Year Olds:
"I was using Google software - a lot of it - in the last year, and slick as it is, there's just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like every week 10 per cent of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it's a different 10 per cent every week - the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more," he opines. "The culture at Google values 'coolness' tremendously, and the quality of service not as much."
One has to wonder if Dare Obasanjo, the author of that quote has looked at Windows Vista recently. I'll take 10% less functionality in my web apps over 70% functionality in my operating system. 'Coolness' is what drives technology adoption.
Meanwhile, Nakov says that after just a few interviews, he could tell that Google operated like an army of 5-year-olds. "I found for myself that Microsoft is better organized, managed and structured. Microsoft do software development in more professional way than Google. Their engineers are better. Their development process is better. Their products are better. Their technologies are better. Their interviews are better," he says.
"Google was like a kindergarden - young and not experienced enough people, an office full of fun and entertainment, interviews typical for junior people and lack of traditions in development of high quality software products."
Google is operating on a completely different model - and a different scale than Microsoft. The fact that Google hasn't come bursting apart at the seams already tells much about their management. I have heard through the grapevine that the biggest problem at Google is that there just aren't enough decision-makers, but at the end of the day a company of that size running so well the way that it is speaks volumes about their model. Microsoft is playing catch-up.
The jist of this is that Mike Dell bought $100M worth of Dell stock today. Not a terrible thing since the guy has a ton of money, and any $100M stock purchase in a company is probably going to raise prices a bit. At the end of the day, it's still his name on the door, and as the founder of the company he's got a responsibility to lead. One of the ways he can show confidence in the company is investing some of his own money. $100M might seem like a lot of ducats to me and you, but to someone like Mike Dell it's pocket change.
Meanwhile Dell continues to bleed in other areas.
Parallels Forms Windows Containers on HP's Itanium Servers
So it seems that Parallels is coming out with a virtualization platform for Itanium on Integrity servers. $4500 per two processors nets you the ability to virtualize Windows into containers (much like Solaris) on HPUX. I only have two questions:
- Who is running Itanium anyway? The only people I know are folks running Oracle on HPUX, and they're only doing it because they're HPUX shops and PA-RISC is more or less dead.
- Who is running Windows on Itanium? Why? I could understand you doing it if you're a HPUX shop, but what benefit do you get from Windows on Itanium when Windows on EM64T is so much better, and so much cheaper?
Mind the tumbleweeds as you walk through that business plan.