Tag Archives: Google

The Magic Of Google’s APIs and Algorithms, The Bread And Butter Of The Google I/O Keynote

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It’s clear that Google had other things it could have talked about on the first day of the I/O conference. Like Google Glass.

Instead, the attendees heard more about how Google has developed new ways to turn data into services. The highlights were not some fancy hardware but the magic of Google’s APIs and algorithms, the bread and butter of what Google does.

I spent part of the afternoon talking with Rackspace’s Robert Scoble and long-time media pro Jake Ludington about the event, which had little of the raw excitement of years past when executives talked breathlessly about Google+ or parachuted on to the top of Moscone to show off Google Glass.

I first met Scoble and Ludington in 2004. Scoble worked at Microsoft and Ludington was a big part of Gnomedex, one of the geekiest conferences of the day. Blogs were arguably the most advanced social networks, mobile phones were still like bricks.

My conversation with Scoble focused on the semantics, the context of the algorithms and the more nitty-gritty aspects of a keynote really meant for developers.

Robert Scoble at Google I/O

Ludington looked for the points in the keynote when the audience seemed most engaged.

Jake Ludington at Google I/O

Both Scoble and Ludington are geeks in their own way. It is the way that data can be one thing and then another that draws them to Google I/O. It’s not too much different today. In 2004 it was about using RSS feeds to read blogs. Today, Google Glass is like a reader, pulling in data to a lens that transmits ir for the human mind to read. Again, it’s a new way to turn data into services.

Scoble and Ludington show that the spectacle of something like a sky diver may be fun but it’s the wonder of innovation that keeps us coming back.


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As Google I/O Approaches, Microsoft Hires A High-Profile Team To Attract Outside Developers

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Just before Google I/O, Microsoft is making a big pitch for developers with a high-profile announcement about a new team that will focus on building outside interest in app development on the Azure platform.

The group,  which will have a base in San Francisco, is part of the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) group led by Technical Fellow John Shewchuk.  As Mary Jo Foley wrote, the new developer team is part of Microsoft’s effort to be a platform provider more so than a software purveyor.

Here’s what Shewchuk wrote recently about the effort:

We’re building out the team by adding top-notch developers and evangelists from across the industry. Two recent examples: James Whittaker – a known industry disruptor and incredible speaker joins us from Bing where he has been leading the development team making Bing knowledge available programmatically – many people may know him from his viral blog post on why he left Google for Microsoft. And Patrick Chanezon just joined us from VMware where he was driving their cloud and tools developer relations – he has a ton of expertise in the open source space which will be increasingly important given our new Azure IaaS support for Linux.

Of particular note is the hiring of Chanezon, who recently left VMware to join Microsoft as its director of enterprise evangelism. In a blog post, Chanezon puts an emphasis on Microsoft’s Azure platform and its readiness. Interestingly, he says that Azure “is more open than people think.” I take that as he and the development team have some work in growing awareness about the Azure infrastructure.

Chanezon leaves a job at VMware where he managed developer relations for Spring and Cloud Foundry. Spring and Cloud Foundry were recently spun out into a separate company called Pivotal that is positioning as a platform for data analytics and app development. Chanezon worked at Google on the Cloud Platform Advocacy Team manager before leaving for VMware.

It’s apparent that Microsoft has built a world-class development platform but getting people to use it has posed its challenges. This is in part due to Microsoft’s past focus on its insistence that developers uses Microsoft technology at every level of the stack. That attitude has shifted as symbolized in the news today and a series of announcements over the past several months related to Azure. It has launched new mobile features for iOS and Android development. In March they offered support For PhoneGap, Dropbox and Hadoop. Arguably the most strategic move came last month with the news of general availability of Active Directory on the Azure platform.

Still, Microsoft has lagged in attracting developer talent to the Azure platform.  What it needs is not just good evangelists but a deeper ecosystem that will only come if it can build credibility  in the market.


TechCrunch » Microsoft

Outlook.com Users Can Now Chat With Their Google Friends

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Here is something you probably didn’t see coming: Outlook.com just enabled chat interoperability with Google Talk. This new feature, which is rolling out worldwide over the next few days, allows Outlook.com users to chat with their friends on Google, just like they can already do with their Facebook friends. Given the somewhat strained relationship between Microsoft and Google, this move comes as a bit of a surprise, but it looks like Microsoft doesn’t expect any issues with this rollout.

The new chat feature will be available across a number of Outlook.com-related products, including your inbox, calendar, address book and SkyDrive, so you can chat with your friends on Google while working on a document, for example.

As Microsoft’s senior product manager for Outlook.com Dharmesh Mehta told me yesterday, Microsoft heard from its users that chat interoperability was “one of the things that was holding people back from switching from Gmail to Outlook.com.” Many of those users who did switch, he added, said that this was a feature “they missed after the switch.”

To enable Google chat in Outlook.com, users simply have to connect their accounts using Google’s standard OAuth system to give Microsoft access to their accounts. After that, they can start new chats by hovering over a Gmail user’s contact cord or right from the standard chat pane.

One thing that doesn’t currently work, though, is to start group chats that include Gmail and Facebook users. Mehta left open the possibility that Microsoft would enable this in the future, but for now, the team hasn’t built the pieces that would allow Microsoft to pass messages between the networks.

Google is widely expected to launch updates to its own text, audio and video chat features at I/O later this week. It’s unlikely, however, that these will have any influence on the new features Microsoft announced today.


TechCrunch » Microsoft

Microsoft: Google Docs Is Not Worth The Gamble, Makes You Less Productive

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After Bing and its Scroogled campaign, Microsoft is now taking aim at Google Docs. Jake Zborowski, Microsoft’s senior product manager for Office, actually published two anti-Docs blog posts today: one homes in on document fidelity, and the other, which includes a number of user testimonials, argues that Google Docs isn’t quite ready for primetime.

If it took me a little while to get Michael Atalla, the director of product marketing for Office 365, to actually say “Google” in my chat with him about Microsoft’s productivity tools earlier this week, Zborowski doesn’t beat around the bush for even a second. “Converting Office files into Google Apps is a gamble,” he writes. “Why take the gamble on converting your Office files to Google Docs when you can use Microsoft Office and the Microsoft Office Web Apps to create, share and edit your Office files with your content intact?”

That, Microsoft says, is true on the web, but also on the tablet, where Google’s Quickoffice usually does a pretty good job at converting documents (though not in Microsoft’s example, of course).

So what about the new Chrome document viewer? Also too much of a gamble for Zborowski: “The last gamble with Google is how the company helps you view Microsoft Office documents using their file viewers. Even this is a gamble that may be too risky to take.”

There is, of course, also a video that accompanies the post, which reminds folks that they could lose their promotion if they decide to switch to Docs:

In his second post (“Office is a team player”), Zborowski also argues that Google Docs is missing too many features, though in this case, a number of Microsoft customers make the argument for him. Here is an example:

As we continue to improve Office, we look for changes big and small that help people do more with less effort. Some improvements are small, like the new paste options we introduced in Office 2010. Other features reduce the amount of time it takes to accomplish a task like Flash Fill and Quick Analysis in Excel. The breadth of capabilities Office can lead to significant gains in what people can accomplish. With Google Docs, on the other hand, people have to find ways to overcome feature gaps by working harder, spending their time finding workarounds, or potentially using third-party tools to overcome the gaps.

“When we switched from Google Apps to Office 365, we freed our people to work together in synergy, and it has produced good results in every area of our business.” Read more

– Andy Springer, Director, Rookie Recruits

To back all of this up, Microsoft also launched whymicrosoft.com, which includes more testimonials, screenshots and other resources for those who haven’t been scared straight yet and are still considering the switch to Google Docs.

And here is the video that goes with that post:

All of this anti-Google Docs/Drive rhetoric just before Google I/O probably isn’t accidental. With Quickoffice, Google now has the basis to offer a pretty compelling alternative to the Microsoft Web Apps (which, and Microsoft has a point there, are generally more fully-featured than Google’s tools) and I would expect the company to launch more Quickoffice-based products next Wednesday.


TechCrunch » Microsoft