Google against Vista desktop search
Google launches antitrust complaint against Vista’s desktop search.
Who’s the monopolist, Google or Microsoft? The two companies have been trading antitrust criticisms over the last few months, with Microsoft most recently asking the federal government to scrutinize Google’s proposed merger with DoubleClick. Google has been playing the same game, but it has conducted its campaign in secret and directly with the federal government. The New York Times has just revealed that Google months ago filed a confidential complaint with the Justice Department, asking that Microsoft be forced to alter Vista’s desktop search behavior on antitrust grounds.
The complaint says that Vista’s indexing service cannot easily be turned off and creates a drag on system resources when operating at the same time as rival indexers, like the one in Google Desktop Search. Google argues that this behavior is anticompetitive, and several state Attorneys General seem willing to pursue the issue. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer managed to wring a response from a Google spokesman that sheds more light on the claims. “The search boxes built throughout Vista are hard-wired to Microsoft’s own desktop search product,” said Google’s Ricardo Reyes, “with no way for users to choose an alternate provider from these visible search access points. Likewise, Vista makes it impractical to turn off Microsoft’s search index.”
Microsoft’s Bradford Smith, the company’s general counsel, sounded a conciliatory tone. “We’ve made a decision to go the extra mile to be reasonable,” Smith told the Times. “The discussions between the company and the various government agencies have been quite fruitful.”
This might be nothing more than a business dispute between rivals, but the Times also reveals that the man in charge of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, Thomas Barnett, circulated an unusual memo to state Attorneys General in recent days that asks them to reject Google’s complaint (many states were party to the main US antitrust case against Microsoft). While such a request is rare enough, it invites additional scrutiny because Barnett also served previously as the vice chair of the antitrust and consumer protection practice group at DC law firm Covington & Burling—a firm that represented Microsoft throughout its antitrust battles with the government.
Barnett, who has a degree from Yale and Harvard Law, had no direct involvement with the Microsoft case while at Covington & Burling and recused himself at Justice from handling any issues related to the company out of an abundance of caution. The Times reports that an internal ethics panel has now cleared him to work on Microsoft issues. There’s no evidence of any pro-Microsoft pandering here; rather, the paper points out that this is only the latest in a long line of actions that the Bush administration has taken to defend Microsoft (and other large US companies like Apple).
As part of its consent decree, Microsoft also worked with the US government before Vista was released to ensure that no problems would result, and the government signed off on the operating system. The company also made changes to placate the EU before Vista was released, so it’s not as though Microsoft hasn’t made a good-faith effort in this area. According to Google, though, Microsoft still needs to go one step further: provide a way to swap out the back-end desktop search engine.
Windows Vista is a line of graphical operating systems used on personal computers, including home and business desktops, notebook computers, Tablet PCs, and media centers. Prior to its announcement on July 22, 2005, Windows Vista was known by its codename “Longhorn”. Development was completed on November 8, 2006; over the following three months it was released in stages to computer hardware and software manufacturers, business customers, and retail channels. On January 30, 2007, it was released worldwide to the general public, and was made available for purchase and downloading from Microsoft’s web site. The release of Windows Vista comes more than five years after the introduction of its predecessor, Windows XP, making it the longest time span between two releases of Microsoft Windows.
Windows Vista contains hundreds of new features; some of the most significant include an updated graphical user interface and visual style dubbed Windows Aero, improved searching features, new multimedia creation tools such as Windows DVD Maker, and completely redesigned networking, audio, print, and display sub-systems. Vista also aims to increase the level of communication between machines on a home network using peer-to-peer technology, making it easier to share files and digital media between computers and devices. For developers, Vista includes version 3.0 of the .NET Framework, which aims to make it significantly easier for developers to write high-quality applications than with the traditional Windows API.
Microsoft’s primary stated objective with Windows Vista, however, has been to improve the state of security in the Windows operating system. One common criticism of Windows XP and its predecessors has been their commonly exploited security vulnerabilities and overall susceptibility to malware, viruses and buffer overflows. In light of this, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced in early 2002 a company-wide ‘Trustworthy Computing initiative’ which aims to incorporate security work into every aspect of software development at the company. Microsoft stated that it prioritized improving the security of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 above finishing Windows Vista, thus delaying its completion.
Windows Vista has been the target of a number of negative assessments by various groups. Criticism of Windows Vista has included protracted development time, more restrictive licensing terms, the inclusion of a number of new Digital Rights Management technologies aimed at restricting the copying of protected digital media, and the usability of other new features such as User Account Control.
Google Via John Battelle, Rick Skrenta’s remarkable piece on what Google have actually built. They don’t just have the world’s best search engine, they have the world’s largest and most scalable platform for developing huge web-based applications.
Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It’s a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup.
While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.
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