Chrome vs. Windows Vs. U and Me

The battle between Microsoft and Google entered a new phase last week with the announcement of Google’s Chrome Operating System

This isn’t the first salvo in a war that has already seen Google lob its Chrome Web browser against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google pit its Android smart-phone operating system against Microsoft’s WM and Microsoft, in turn, aim its new search technology, Bing, against Google’s very heart – the Google search engine.

This is all heady stuff and good for lots of press, but in the end none of this is likely to make a real difference for either company or, indeed, for consumers. It’s just noise – a form of mutually assured destruction intended to keep each company in check.

Microsoft makes most of its money from two products, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Nearly everything else it makes loses money, sometimes deliberately. Google makes most of its money from selling Internet ads next to search results. Nearly everything else it does loses money, too.

Neither company really cares because both make so much from their core products that it simply doesn’t matter. But companies, like people, strive and dream, and in this case both dream, at least sometimes, of destroying the other. Only they can’t – or won’t – do it in the end, because it is against the interests of either company to do so.

The vast majority of Google searches are, of course, done on PCs running Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. It is not in Google’s real interest to displace these products, which have facilitated so much of its success. Chrome products are given away, so they bring in no revenue for Google, and they don’t even provide a better search or advertising experience for their users, the company admits. So why does Google even bother?

To keep Microsoft on its toes.

What Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, has to fear more than anything else is that he’ll awake one day to learn that the Google search engine suddenly doesn’t work on any Windows computers: Something happened overnight and what worked yesterday doesn’t work today. It would have to be an act of deliberate sabotage on Microsoft’s part and blatantly illegal, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Microsoft would claim ignorance and innocence and take days, weeks or months to reverse the effect, during which time Google would have lost billions of dollars.

So Google Chrome and Chrome OS and Android are all intended to keep Microsoft on the defensive and less likely to push its own Big Red Button.

This makes even more sense given the recent advent of Microsoft’s Bing search technology, which performs precisely the same competitive control function against Google. Bing hasn’t a hope of toppling Google as the premier search engine, and Microsoft knows it. To date, Bing’s success has actually been at the expense of Google’s competitors, not Google itself.

But thanks to Microsoft’s deep pockets and fierce screwball reputation, Bing has already accomplished its main purpose: reminding Google executives who they’re messing with.

It’s not as if these companies are gearing up to produce automobiles. The engineering teams for any of these products are, at most, 20 to 30 people – immaterial for Microsoft, which has 90,000 or so employees, and Google, which has 20,000. Nor are all of Google’s products even guaranteed to ship, being as they are in that semisolid technical state called beta test and subject to cancellation on a whim.

Yes, Google would love to get a toehold in the netbook and smart-phone markets, especially at Microsoft’s expense. The Chrome OS and Android are both ideal for pushing Google’s net-centric view of computing. But the company worries far more about protecting its current cash cow – search – and says as much when it is unwilling to claim that Android and the Chrome OS will be better for Web-based applications than the platforms they are intended to supplant, which is nominally Windows.

Some company with a new idea and no legacy products to defend will eventually arise to clean Microsoft’s clock. Or maybe Microsoft’s market will simply disappear as PCs are subsumed into cars and mobile phones, possibly leaving Windows behind in the process. Whatever happens, it won’t be Google’s doing, because Google is too busy defending its own turf to seriously encroach on Microsoft’s.

And don’t forget Apple, which with the ipod and iPhone has shown an ability to revolutionize markets other companies saw as mature. Microsoft and Google have yet to do something like that.

I wish they would. I wish these companies had more guts, that either would make a true bet-the-company investment in changing the world, but they won’t. Google engineers are allowed to spend 20 percent of their time on new ideas – yet of those thousands of ideas, the company can really invest in only a dozen per year, leading to dissatisfaction and defections as the best nerds leave to pursue their dreams.

Maybe they’ll leave for the startup that finally topples Microsoft ... or Google. But until then these companies will posture, spend a little money on research and development, and keep each other in check, while reporters and publications pretend that it matters.

For the full story pls check out the Eco times article where parts of this article have been taken from
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/4772686.cms

A great article for those interested in the Enfield Bullet ! Check out when time permits. Might explain why guys like me still ride the Bullet Inspite of all the negatives that naysayers can shoot at it....
What’s bigger than the Bullet? - Swami Ashwinananda Friday, November 07, 2003

Seemingly innocent question, teenaged boy on a bicycle, small dusty village on NH 45. And considering I was on an RE 500, I smiled confidently and replied ‘nothing else in the country’! Little did I know I was being set up to be knocked down. The young chap had been strolling around my bike as I enjoyed the customary ‘chai’ at a local tea shop, his casual air of disinterest thinly concealing the gleam of admiration in his eyes. My answer was met with a disdainful smirk. ‘I saw a foreigner on a Yamaha last week. That was much bigger. He told me they’re going to make it in India. 1200 cc, and it was sooo (he stretched his arms out as far as they would go) big. When I'm old enough, that’s what I’m going to ride’. He gave my bike one last look out of the corner of his eye, then pedaled away nonchalantly on his creaky bicycle. Many kilometers down the road, and alone with my thoughts on the highway, I pondered his question. It was the classic mental pivot. Both ridiculously simplistic and unbelievably deep at the same time.

‘What’s bigger than the Bullet?’

In the old days, people bought a Bullet not because of displacement, size or weight, but for very different reasons. It was the ‘Raja Gadi’. The choice of real men. At least that was the picture Bullet advertising painted then, and a vivid and colourful picture it was, best viewed with the ‘Bullet meri jaan’ jingle playing in your head.

Then about 15 years ago, the Jap Bike wars started. First there were the hundreds, then later the one-tens, the one-fifties, the one-seventy-fives… each claiming to deliver more power and ‘better mileage’, if that’s even possible at the same time, than the other. Buzz boxes abounded, tiddlers screamed manically on every street, and on another road far from where these marketing, R&D and advertising wars were being fought, the Grand Daddy of them all chugged steadily towards the brink of oblivion.

Recently though, there seems to be have been a revival of sorts, at first glance, rather heartening to a die-hard British motorcycle enthusiast like me. It seems as though more people are waking up from their Jap drone-induced stupor, and noticing that there was always a bike that was ‘bigger’ than the plastic clad Jappos available in the country.

Suddenly, one sees many young, macho, iron pumping, testosterone charged, leather clad gentlemen on Bullets. Not just the new-fangled ones, but some even on bikes a tad older than they are. Heartened by this turn of events, I accosted one recently, and asked him why he had chosen to ride a Bullet. My eager curiosity was met by a flat and fake-accented answer. ‘Who wants to buy a 180 cc when there’s a 535 cc available maan. It’s the biggest bike in India!’

I smiled thinly, shook his hand, and walked away thinking to myself ‘maybe the Bullet did manage to stop before it got all the way to oblivion. But it’s probably just standing there teetering at the brink.’

There’s a reason for my pessimism. Viewed from the cubic capacity perspective, the BHP perspective, the wheelbase and weight perspective, the ‘sheer size’ perspective or the advertising budget perspective, there will soon be many, many contenders to the position of Biggest Motorcycle in India. Which means that our testosterone-charged gentleman would buy one of them the moment it shows up on the market (attractively priced I might add). Just as soon, I presume, as he’d use an opportunity to take his shirt off and flex his tattooed muscles.

People today seem to be buying the Bullet for reasons like machismo (pun unintended), attitude, power and freedom. All the wrong reasons if you ask me. Because they’re all easily re-created, duplicated, and maybe even outdone by competition. Just like the 100cc Japs stopped the Bullet in its tracks 15 years ago, we’ll soon have 250, 350 and maybe even 750 and 1200cc Japs shooting the Bullet down again with weapons like cubic capacity, cruiser styling, fatter tyres, more chrome, and more jeans-leather-and-scantily-clad-women advertising --- all of which are in vogue now.

So what is it that will keep the Bullet competitive through the waves of onslaught from bikes that cater to the changing fancies of fickle Indian motorcyclists? What does the Bullet have going for it that no other manufacturer can hope to match no matter how much money he spends on research, development, space-age materials and nubile models?

I think the answer can be summed up in one word. Character.

To me, the Bullet stands for simplicity. A design that worked well not because it changed to incorporate every new discovery at NASA, but because the folks that designed it 50 years ago got everything right the first time. And then didn’t try to fix things that weren’t broke. It’s a bike that has built a reputation for being reliable, simple to work with, comfortable to be with, and lasts a whole lifetime… which is definitely a whole lifetime longer than the Japs, who outdate their throwaway models before one has even paid the second EMI. The most interesting thing is that over the years, this unglamorous but truly solid reputation has rubbed off on people that ride the Bullet too. The result, when one looks closely, is a bond between an individual and his Bullet, where one is but the mirror of the other.

To some folks like me who’ve wanted a Bullet since we were kids, it was the persona of these people that inspired the choice of a motorcycle more than the intrinsic value of the motorcycle itself. They were simple people, responsible people, strong people (not just in body) and they were people you could trust and rely on. I for one just bought into the quiet pride, solidity and soft spoken yet powerful image of Bullet riders I saw as a child, only to realize much later that these were the qualities of the bike itself.

In this day where people are realizing it’s better to step back from technology and glamour sometimes and fly subsonic rather than supersonic, I hope that people soon learn to appreciate and aspire to own the Bullet for what it is. A piece of machinery that has lived, served, rewarded and stood by its owners long enough to develop a character of its own. A motorcycle that has reached that point in evolution where its value cannot be measured in cubic centimeters, kilometres per hour or pounds per square inch. And a brand that speaks volumes for its owner for a lifetime… always saying just the same old good things.

If I had encountered my cyclist friend on the way back, I would have stopped him on his creaky bicycle and given him the answer I should have given him in the first place.

There’s just one thing that’s bigger than the Bullet. It’s the pride of owning one.

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Eliminator will get eliminated by a bigger, faster, Eliminator. A new Terminator will overcome the pulse of the Pulsar. The Shogun will be overshadowed by the Ronin, the RX 135 by the ZXR, and so on. But the Bullet will remain Bullet. For it is not a reality. It is a dream.

Dreams are of many types – pleasant, painful, enjoyable, scary, exciting, new, old and many more. Bullet is all this and much more! It is the closest any bike comes to being all things to all people. Being all things to all people is impossible. A theory. That is what Bullet is. A theory. And people love theories. All people love theories. Especially if they sound so good. And nobody can deny (even my 100 year old grandmother does not deny) that no other bike in the world sounds like Bullet.

Credits for writing this piece : Swami Ashwinananda (from the RE website) & Dilip Bam

The pleasure of driving a bullet

The pleasure is when you finish your day ride, and reach in one piece. You the smallest vehicle on the road, and you survived.

The pleasure is when you take off your wristwatch, and see a band of untanned skin.

The pleasure is when your motorcycle and you move as one single united form. Whatever shape the road takes, whichever end of the compass it leads to.

The pleasure is when you use your hands, arms, thighs, knees and feet to steer.

The pleasure is when you take off your riding jacket for a break, and feel the breeze dry your sweat.

The pleasure is when you sing to yourself on an empty road. You are the world’s best rock star.

The pleasure is when your rear wheel slides, and you bring it back, when the front wheel lifts, and you take your time bringing it back.

The pleasure is when you cut through air, at 50 kph or 100.

The pleasure is when you reach a place you never been before, and someone you never seen before asks you for a ride. And comes back grinning.

The pleasure is when you wave to village kids, and they wave back.

The pleasure is when you almost, almost fall. But dont

The pleasure is when you fight the wind, and win.

The pleasure is when you get up that narrow path for the view you never forget.

The pleasure is when you view the world at an angle at 90kph

The pleasure is when you look at a dust-streaked face in the mirror after a 500 km ride, and don't want to wash up.

The pleasure is when your pillion moves with you.

The pleasure is when you can see the petrol after a top-up.

The pleasure is when you jump a speedbreaker.

The pleasure is when you stop to help push a stranded car to the side of the road.

The pleasure is when you stop at the smallest of towns, and somebody asks you technical specifications.

The pleasure is when you know how it feels to have felt the cool morning and the hot afternoon, the light rain and the damp fog.

The pleasure is when you leave four-wheeler traffic standing in a jam.

The pleasure is when you aren’t lulled by an air-conditioner.

The pleasure is when you are free. Open. Independent. Liberated.