Happy birthday Windows!

Last Friday marks 30 years of existence for Microsoft Windows. Microsoft is the first software company. Bill Gates envisioned long ago how a software company should be like before anyone knew what software actually is. Microsoft has been the face of computing for many long years and it still is in a very tangible way. There are many ups and downs for a huge company as Microsoft where the former clearly dominated the latter, it wasn’t always a cakewalk for Microsoft to protect its identity. Software is funny. You clearly dominate the industry, become myopic and then you are irrelevant. We have seen recently this week on how Rdio filed for bankruptcy after being a super hit just 4 years ago. Similarly we have seen many instances in the past where companies faltered not knowing where their next bet should be and going bankrupt.

This was Microsoft's first logo

Microsoft was started in 1974 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975. When Paul saw the future in Altair 8800 (A Micro processor) he persuaded Bill Gates that the time was ripe and they have to jump into the world of programming. Then Bill Gates and Paul Allen somehow convinced Altair manufacturers and started to write programming immediately. After spending many sleepless nights, they finally were succeeded in delivering the program. 

1980s

These were the days of IBM Personal computers which took public by storm. Microsoft wrote the program of MS DOS for IBM. The biggest mistake IBM did was allowing Microsoft retain the licensing rights on MS DOS. When Bill Gates and his team at Microsoft were developing MS DOS for IBM, they were not at all confident of getting the licensing rights as IBM being market leader was ruthless. But the management of IBM thought that nobody in the industry could replicate their success in hardware manufacturing and thought that they will remain market leaders in the foreseeable future. Bill Gates from the inception is a software guy. He when came to know that the management of IBM is not at all interested in retaining the licensing of MS DOS, he was shocked and said to his close friends how big this mistake is and also added that IBM is going to repent on this Historical mistake. He was right. Many manufacturers came around figuring how to do hardware and started to approach Microsoft for the software. Microsoft suddenly replaced IBM as face of computing.

Microsoft also licensed their ‘Basic’ programming for Macintosh and wrote office software for Mac. Bill Gates worked closely with Steve Jobs in creating Macintosh’s software. Bill Gates was a little apprehensive on Mac’s success as he thought the Macintosh that was launched in 1984 was way ahead of its times and may not succeed. Turns out, he was right and Macintosh’s failure lead Steve Jobs step out of the company. But people started to look at Macintosh’s GUI as a game changer. 

Then the whole industry started to believe that Graphical User Interface is the future of the computing and the huge debate of Text based interface vs Graphics based interface soon turned into a intuitive common sense. It is clear - GUI is the future.

1990s

Windows came up with Windows 95 and it was the first windows operating system that supported GUI and it became an instant hit. Apple immediately filed a lawsuit that Microsoft copied their Macintosh’s interface and the competition became intense. Microsoft finally relented and agreed to purchase $350 million worth Apple shares in ‘out of court’ settlement when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. While Apple pursued an integrated approach from the start where Hardware, Software and Services are provided by a single company, Bill Gates’ vision was different. He thought consumer should be given a choice of different hardware manufacturers and he pursued an open approach where different components are designed by different companies. In hindsight, we have to say that the industry immensely benefitted from Microsoft’s open systems approach. Competition intensified among the manufacturers which turned into a Zero sum game which triggered price wars. In the end, consumer benefitted. 

Microsofts push to Enterprise is also a commendable effort suited to its open approach. Microsoft allowed OS customisation and tweaking according to the needs of the enterprises and they came up with a server operating system that was and still is immensely popular. Even food chains like KFC use Microsoft’s enterprise Operating system. Here instead of whole Operating system a lite version of Windows is deployed on a low cost hardware that saved lot of costs and was easier to use. 

2000s

Many say that this decade is a ‘lost decade’ for Microsoft. Steve Ballmer when took over Microsoft, it is a giant. Microsoft lost focus and ventured into many irrelevant spaces in the fear of being Myopic. They ventured into robotics, phones without a vision and did many irrelevant innovations that didn’t help its desktop operating system in any sort. In 2004 they debuted a Windows based tablet which is a complete failure. Windows Vista’s failure didn’t help Microsoft. On the other hand Apple and Google are driving ahead leaving Microsoft behind. In a desperate attempt to attract attention, Microsoft even ventured in to search space through Bing. The abbreviation of Bing is ‘Bing is not Google.’ If you name your product after your competitor, it says how terrified and desperate you are. After losing ground to Apple and Google on mobile front and Amazon on server front, Microsoft really need a restructuring. 

Present

Steve Ballmer was sacked as CEO by the board and Satya Nadella who overlooked Enterprise Mobility division and cloud platform Azure was made the CEO. Satya Nadella when made the CEO stressed the importance of Mobile first approach and started conscious efforts to bring back Microsoft as an enterprise leader. 

Its too early to judge Satya Nadella as a CEO but innovations of Microsoft recently on Surface tablets, Surface books, Windows Mobile, Azure, Microsoft Band, Xbox, Holo lens, and Windows 10 looks promising. Satya has a clear head unlike the chaotic personality that represents Steve Ballmer. Below is a video explaining his vision for Microsoft after a recent product launch.

Microsoft indeed brought us a long way. Let’s hope Microsoft takes us to even more heights we could never have imagined. Happy 30th Anniversary Windows!

Google Services - A faustian Bargain?

Faust is the protagonist of classic German legend. He is a scholar who is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life. This leads him to make a pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Now the reason I brought this up is that while all the Users are Faust s in their souls, the question that whether users are always in a bargain with Google always ponders me.

Google has always been the go to company for many services we use today. Some might be surprised on how much google knows about us. Google has got the upper hand over Apple in the services it is in because Google was able to read more of your data and provide you many contextual services. Google now, for example is a service which provides contextual cards. When there is a reservation made, be it flight, movie, or a bus, Google automatically reads your mail, looks for the details in the ticket and serves you the contextual cards telling you the time to start based on your current location and traffic conditions to your destination. Now for this to happen, Google has to read your mails, strip the vital information of your location, destination, time and date of the travel. Only then will it be able to serve the cards. For an user, it doesn’t matter what information Google is gathering as long as these services thrill you.

But the inevitable question that arises is what else Google is doing with this data. If you think that Google collects data just to provide contextual services, you are terribly wrong. After Google does this, it sells that data to advertisers. Advertisers in turn use this data to serve you contextual ads. Google is doing this through its service called adsense suite. Google assigns a random ID to all the data and uses that data to serve you contextual ads. While the identity of the person can’t be known, the service reading your mails and analysing your location data sounds a little creepy. Android users can open this link and can see their location history. Open this link and you can get all the searches you made at Google. Google not just tracks you, it even sells this data to companies. 

Many Apple users face the heat from their friends who are Android users on how cool Google services are but they  never realise that Google steals gobs of data from them. Apple recently through its software update iOS 9 brought the capability of converting mails into calendar events. While Google fanboys proclaim the feature to be available for them for two years, the thing they never understand is that, while Google’s approach makes the server read your mail and create calendar event for you, Apple’s approach makes the iPhone do that for you without a byte of data moving out of your phone. A rational person would understand how different the two approaches are and why Apple takes so much time to bring out these features and execute them just right.

Down below is a screenshot of famous game 'subway surfers.' Now as you can see, it collects the information like, Device & app history (Allows the app to view one or more of: information about activity on the device, which apps are running, browsing history and bookmarks), Device ID and call information, etc.. Now here’s a trivial game that can read the apps that are present in your phone, apps which are running in the phone, browsing history on your phone and bookmarks present in your phone. Now what do you think the developer of the app does collecting the information? They sell it to third party, makes money and doesn’t care what the third party does making you vulnerable. 

Now, Apple never allows this to happen. That is the reason you find many apps in iPhone less functional than their Android counterparts for a simple reason that Apple never gives such sensitive information away. This is one of the two reasons why you find many Android apps being free while Apple charging premium for the fact that Android developers can collect your data, sell it and make revenues. The other reason being many pirated versions available and the ability to side load them in Android. But in Apple, you can download the apps only from the Appstore unless the device is jailbroken. 

For Apple, customer is the king while for Google, customer's data is the king. I know that this post started from being a critique of Google services has ended being a comparison between the approaches of Android and Apple, but the point I was trying to make is that choice is subjective. People who are very sensitive and critical about where their data is going might want to depend on Apple and people who don’t care where their data is ending up as far as they are enticed with the contextual services of Google might want to stay with Google. 

So while entering into Google services, beware that you are entering into a faustian bargain. Only time will tell whether Google is a devil or it isn’t!