GATES VS. GOOGLE - 4
Source
Search and Destroy
Bill Gates is on a mission to build a Google killer. What got him so riled? The darling of search is moving into software—and that's Microsoft's turf.By Fred Vogelstein
(Photo: Newscast)
The project's beginnings were auspicious. With Gates' backing, Payne recruited top talent throughout the organization, like Ken Moss, whom he brought in as chief engineer. Moss had been instrumental in the early 1990s in creating Excel, Microsoft's spreadsheet program. The fledgling search unit quickly grew to roughly 500 engineers and marketers. Nevertheless, it successfully cultivated a startup—even renegade—mentality. Payne's managers bragged to underlings that they had the clout to poach anyone inside Microsoft. And the focus was on winning—in the halls near Payne's office, the walls were covered with performance reports on the group's servers, comments from customers on how Microsoft could improve, and media clippings about Google.
For six months the team even bought its own servers. Gaining clearance to run and monitor the project on the corporate server farm would have been too time-consuming, Payne's team felt—not to mention the strain an ambitious search offering would put on the systems. (Google is widely estimated to run 250,000 servers to support its search.) The technology they eventually unveiled used a heavily modified version of the Windows server operating system. All its other components were of their own design, run with a lot of software they had written themselves.
Confidence ran high. A senior Microsoft executive said the top brass thought the fight against Google "was going to be Netscape all over again." Microsoft has a long, dramatic history of being a fast follower, rarely first in a market but ultimately providing the most accessible and practical solution, then outmarketing competitors. The company hasn't always played by the rules, but when it has gone after a market, it has done so quickly and aggressively. Current and former executives of companies like Apple, WordPerfect, Lotus, Novell, and of course Netscape can attest to that.
Like Google, Netscape threatened to sideline Microsoft's operating system, in its case with the web browser that founder Marc Andreessen unveiled in 1994. The reason was that the browser, which cost each user $39.95, would enable applications like word processors and spreadsheets to reside on centralized Internet servers rather than on the hard drives of users' desktops. That in turn would lessen their need for Windows or Office, sapping Microsoft's business. But Gates rallied Microsoft to develop its own browser, which it then bundled free with Windows. Netscape's market share collapsed, and the upstart was forced to sell to AOL (like FORTUNE's publisher, a unit of Time Warner) three years later.
Trying to build a Google killer, however, has turned out to be truly humbling for Microsoft. The effort has taken longer, cost more money, and exposed more big-company problems at Microsoft than anyone imagined. As Payne predicted, targeted online advertising has indeed become a gold mine. Still in its infancy, it's one of the hottest sectors in high tech, a $5-billion-a-year market growing at some 40% annually. Yet no matter what Payne and his crew do, Google and Yahoo seem to do better. "I remember when [Payne's team] showed off their first prototype in early 2004—people laughed because it was so much like Google," says a former Microsoft executive. "We had copied them. That's not how you lead."
A headache for Payne is that Microsoft isn't as nimble as smaller, younger rivals like Google and Yahoo. For example, at Google, engineers are responsible for the software that they write—period. They don't hand it off to a "system operations" team to deal with bugs. When something goes awry, the team that wrote the software and knows it best is responsible for fixing it.
Search and Destroy
Bill Gates is on a mission to build a Google killer. What got him so riled? The darling of search is moving into software—and that's Microsoft's turf.By Fred Vogelstein
(Photo: Newscast)
The project's beginnings were auspicious. With Gates' backing, Payne recruited top talent throughout the organization, like Ken Moss, whom he brought in as chief engineer. Moss had been instrumental in the early 1990s in creating Excel, Microsoft's spreadsheet program. The fledgling search unit quickly grew to roughly 500 engineers and marketers. Nevertheless, it successfully cultivated a startup—even renegade—mentality. Payne's managers bragged to underlings that they had the clout to poach anyone inside Microsoft. And the focus was on winning—in the halls near Payne's office, the walls were covered with performance reports on the group's servers, comments from customers on how Microsoft could improve, and media clippings about Google.
For six months the team even bought its own servers. Gaining clearance to run and monitor the project on the corporate server farm would have been too time-consuming, Payne's team felt—not to mention the strain an ambitious search offering would put on the systems. (Google is widely estimated to run 250,000 servers to support its search.) The technology they eventually unveiled used a heavily modified version of the Windows server operating system. All its other components were of their own design, run with a lot of software they had written themselves.
Confidence ran high. A senior Microsoft executive said the top brass thought the fight against Google "was going to be Netscape all over again." Microsoft has a long, dramatic history of being a fast follower, rarely first in a market but ultimately providing the most accessible and practical solution, then outmarketing competitors. The company hasn't always played by the rules, but when it has gone after a market, it has done so quickly and aggressively. Current and former executives of companies like Apple, WordPerfect, Lotus, Novell, and of course Netscape can attest to that.
Like Google, Netscape threatened to sideline Microsoft's operating system, in its case with the web browser that founder Marc Andreessen unveiled in 1994. The reason was that the browser, which cost each user $39.95, would enable applications like word processors and spreadsheets to reside on centralized Internet servers rather than on the hard drives of users' desktops. That in turn would lessen their need for Windows or Office, sapping Microsoft's business. But Gates rallied Microsoft to develop its own browser, which it then bundled free with Windows. Netscape's market share collapsed, and the upstart was forced to sell to AOL (like FORTUNE's publisher, a unit of Time Warner) three years later.
Trying to build a Google killer, however, has turned out to be truly humbling for Microsoft. The effort has taken longer, cost more money, and exposed more big-company problems at Microsoft than anyone imagined. As Payne predicted, targeted online advertising has indeed become a gold mine. Still in its infancy, it's one of the hottest sectors in high tech, a $5-billion-a-year market growing at some 40% annually. Yet no matter what Payne and his crew do, Google and Yahoo seem to do better. "I remember when [Payne's team] showed off their first prototype in early 2004—people laughed because it was so much like Google," says a former Microsoft executive. "We had copied them. That's not how you lead."
A headache for Payne is that Microsoft isn't as nimble as smaller, younger rivals like Google and Yahoo. For example, at Google, engineers are responsible for the software that they write—period. They don't hand it off to a "system operations" team to deal with bugs. When something goes awry, the team that wrote the software and knows it best is responsible for fixing it.
Labels: Experiences
posted by lphiep at
6:19 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home