Testing Grounds

It’s becoming more and more clear that Google understands the importance of innovation and optimization much better than other companies, and much better than Microsoft in particular.

Innovation is a term that is overused, but it does not and should not be used to mean clobbering a truly innovative idea with a copy of it using sheer marketing muscle. Google is innovating in a lot of areas, to say nothing about their core business, web searches.

Optimization is something that sounds silly if you put in on a feature list, but the cumulative effect of a snappy application vs. one that slogs along must not be underestimated. Microsoft won the browser war with Netscape by producing a faster browser, but in other areas thay don’t seem to have learned that lesson.

Innovation and optimization are apparently very high priorities for Google. So much so that their web sites don’t feel the same as other web sites. Sometimes their pages load up so fast that they seem to be cached locally.

Same with Picassa, the fantastic image management system that Google acquired. (If you don’t know it, you absolutely must change that — it’s free so there’s nothing to lose.) Picassa’s interface makes is both innovative and startlingly snappy. You start pushing images around and trying things just for the pleasure of using the application. That’s something Microsoft simply doesn’t inspire.

Google is also generating a lot of good will by giving development tools away. I’ve long felt that Microsoft would be wise to give Visual Studio away — they only stand to profit by making it easy for developers to make Microsoft platforms more attractive. But instead they gouge developers for the opportunity to develop for their platforms. (You’ll pay $2,500 for Visual Studio Professional with MSDN Premium, and over $10,000 for Team System Suite.)

Google Charts is a developer tool that is both innovative and fast. It’s innovative because it’s not implemented as a class library or even a web service. It’s implemented as a HTTP server. You just pass the chart data as an HTTP request, and Google returns a chart in image form. It’s free, it’s innovative, and it’s fast. So fast that it often leaves the impression that Google somehow knew what chart you were going to request and had one waiting for you. 

Here is my first usage of Google Charts.

As nifty as it is to send chart data as HTTP arguments, it’s cumbersome in practice, but that’s ok because someone (A guy named Lewis Vance in this case) wrote a nice set of C# classes to do that. You can get his library at Google Code, where Google shares such contributions. Another smart move.

And by the way, if you’ve been in a cave and haven’t tried Google Chrome, do so now. It’s… that’s right — innovative and optimized.

I’m not saying that Google is perfect, but they are a refreshing example of how it is possible to do great business without antagonizing customers and developers. I really like .NET and C#, and, and I worked at Microsoft for five years (plus two years before that as a contractor), so I’m not exactly anti-Microsoft. But Google is making them look very bad, and much of it is their fault.

Tags: Internet, biz //