Posts tagged as: 767

Always on the lookout for a good 767 reference

I agree with Jack Shafer's premise, but not his predictions in his article about Google's future in Slate, but the article does have a great 767 reference:

Google academic papers

The footnotes to Chapter 2 of "The Search" cited a 1998 paper, "The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine," by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. It described the early Google architecture and their plans for it. It's pretty readable, and provides an interest glimpse of their views before they dreamed of controlling the world from their own 767 continually circling the globe at 40,000 feet.

A little research revealed a set of additional papers by Brin and Page, or in some cases one of them along with other co-authors. Someday these papers may provide a historian of science with some valuable source material. I wonder if they saved their early emails?

• The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web
• What can you do with a Web in your Pocket?
• Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web.
• Data Mining: Exploring Large Rule Spaces by Sampling
• Efficient Crawling Through URL Ordering
• Dynamic Itemset Counting and Implication Rules for Market Basket Data

I also came across Sergey's home page from Stanford circa 1998, where I found this adorable picture of him.

The rumors of Microsoft's death are greatly exaggerated

The Web 2.0 bubble has reached the predictable stage of assuming that Microsoft will inevitably fail to adapt to this latest tech craze. You can get the feel for it by reading the comments on Scoble's post about this subject. Where have we seen this before? Oh yes, in December 1982 when VisiOn was announced at Fall Comdex and the press (this was before blogs existed) fell all over itself predicting that Microsoft would lose control of the operating system market to the new wave of integrating environments and integrated products. We saw it again in 1995 when Netscape's browser was going to wipe out Microsoft, because Gates just didn't understand the Internet. Now ten years later we are again hearing that Microsoft is a dinosaur and can't possibly catch up with the latest web services wave.

Let's get serious for a minute. Microsoft has control over 90% of the desktops on the planet. I haven't seen any stats that web based apps are being used by even a few percentage points of the real users out there. As keeps happening, especially in Silicon Valley, the bleeding edge sees everyone they know going crazy over a new set of technologies, and they extrapolate that onto the general public.

History has shown repeatedly that first-movers do not always win, and often disappear. VisiCorp died within a few years of announcing VisiOn, and Microsoft won that round with two products that they hadn't even started work on in 1982: Windows and Office. Netscape failed under the weight of their own arrogance, and IE is now the dominant browser. It isn't just Microsoft who has beat the early market leaders. When Google first appeared, Yahoo was firmly entrenched as the dominant search engine.

I'm far from a Microsoft fan. I've made plenty of jokes about Gates being the Antichrist. I just don't see how the race for a set of technologies that may be exciting (I'm excited by the potential of Web 2.0 too), but haven't produced any products that real people (not bloggers) are using in any sizeable numbers is already over.

Microsoft keeps winning these races for two reasons:

• They keep plugging away at an application area until they do eventually get it right. They have the cash and the fortitude to keep retooling until the market starts adopting their solution.
• Their competitors ALWAYS f*** up. This is the part where I may believe in the supernatural aspects of Gates' success. I've seen it too many times, Fylstra, Kapor, Andreesen. There is something about becoming a billionaire, or at least a hundred-millionaire, that warps people's minds and ability to innnovate. Gates has avoided this, but look at Page and Brin with their new 767 toy. The drumbeat for Google as the new evil empire can be clearly heard.

Do I think Microsoft will inevitably win this race? Of course, not. Nothing is inevitable. But anyone who says the race is already over, and Microsoft can't turn the ship around fast enough is either a fool, has an axe to grind, has no idea of the history of this industry, or all of the above.