RSSGoogle ditching Windows no great sacrifice
Was anyone else vaguely surprised to find out that Google was still using any Microsoft software (other than for testing purposes, of course) in the first place? Given the level of enmity on display between the two companies, and the position Google has staked out calling for services from the cloud, not to mention their already heavy adoption of open source solutions as a business strategy, to the extent I considered what they might run on the desktop there (which was never a great extent) I had always assumed it to be something other than Windows.
Which is part of why it makes it no big deal that the company is reported to be eliminating the platform almost entirely.
If this is news, it's mostly news because the leak sources cited in the Financial Times article (linked above) cite security as the primary reason behind the move. This, of course, has drawn a heated reaction from Microsoft, which is still understandably touchy at being branded the computer security whipping boy after making great advances in the safety of their products in recent years.
But Google doesn't really need a primary reason to do this. Their entire thrust of corporate philosophy militates against running something like Windows on the desktop, whether Windows were made by Microsoft or not. As I have stated before, if the companies are in contention, it's not a simplistic point-by-point dispute over technical minutiae; it's a philosophical dispute of the highest order, over what the future of human computing will look like.
If you accept that premise, then you can see that the security angle, though undoubtedly a factor, isn't really all that important. To those who don't understand the religious war aspects of the dispute between the companies, perhaps including any number of their employees, then these individual factors may seem important, but if it weren't one of them being used as the excuse, it would be another. In fact, the visions just aren't compatible, and Windows on the desktop at Google probably was never going to have worked out.
Excellent presentation of dispute between two companies.
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