Google-Microsoft secret deal?

[Kevin Layman]

After mulling this over some and discussing with various others I've come to the conclusion that there has been some sort of secret deal worked between Google and Microsoft, and likely including Google's kept child Mozilla.

Clearly Google as decided for some reason to abandon enabling the browser to compete with desktop-like apps. Their first move in this direction was the depreciation of Gears. They provided a smokescreen for this by saying they attained their goal of getting a commitment from Microsoft to support HTML5 which would provide the same capabilities as Gears, and that they would support Gears until HTML5 was ready. And at that time it may not have been a smokescreen, it actually does make sense to push for standards instead of a plugin.

But then what happens? Somehow the main standard committee kills the very popular Web Database standard that was replacing Gears storage capabilities in HTML5, even though if I understand it correctly a Google employee is the Chair of the committee?

At the same time Mozilla announces they are dumping Web Database and going with IndexedDb, which by any objective analysis is a HUGE step backward for developers of database-centric Browser-based apps.  See this discussion to get a sense of just some of the overwhelmingly negative response to Mozilla's laughable attempts to justify the decision.

And guess what happens next? Google decides to discontinue Gears even in their own browser, Chrome, and not support Web Database to boot!

While all this is going on and developers are screaming bloody murder about the lack of any technical merits for these decisions, posts on various forums where these discussions are taking place have been deleted when they suggest any sort of connection to Microsoft in regards to No SQL in the browser.

We know for a fact that Microsoft has always feared the browser and done much to cripple it in the past. They used their monopoly to kill Netscape, inflicted the plague of IE6 on the world of web developers and then basically abandoned it for years, allowing Mozilla to benefit. They have consistently thumbed their noses at standards that didn't originate with them, and are ruthless in eliminating or burying superior technology, which sadly always seems to include just about anything innovative in regards to the web.

Google Apps combined with an offline-capable browser would have to be a huge threat to the only thing they have ever done well, Office.

And now, after laying the groundwork to successfully attack them on that front, and actually having a working implementation, Google walks away completely from offline apps and SQL, and then Mozilla jumps on the Microsoft No-SQL-in-the-browser bandwagon.

So, what do you think? What is going on here? Does anyone else smell a rat?

Some wild guesses:

Google quits on Apps, MS quits on Search?

Some sort of patent deal to help Google with Android VS Oracle?

Lead poisoning?

[Marcelo Cantos]

I tend to avoid descending into conspiracy theories, since — in the
spirit of occams razor — incompetence and ignorance are often a more
straightforward explanation of the available evidence than collusion.
In this case, however, I find it difficult to rationalise Google's and
Mozilla's behaviour. They are being thoroughly lambasted on
hacks.mozilla.org, and have precious little to offer in their own
defence. Their core arguments (no usable SQL standard; Microsoft won't
do it; SQL is too heavyweight and less elegant than a JavaScript
solution) are utterly indefensible. It is difficult to reconcile this
with the expectation that the people defining the future of the web
must surely be smarter than the average bear.

Having said that, I'm no stranger to seeing astonishingly incompetent
architecture produces by extremely smart people. I have a hard copy of
code from a previous job that uses several hundred lines of code to
compare two dates and raise an error if one is less than the other. I
believe that a high degree of intelligence can in fact compromise
one's inability to see complexity for what it is. As Einstein put it,
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more
violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move
in the opposite direction."

So I am on the fence on this one, but I think Kevin's hypothesis is
perfectly plausible, and quite consistent with both the prima facie
evidence and the shenanigans that typically go on between heavyweight
corporate interests with large patent portfolios. And let's not forget
that Google is young and fragile when it comes to patent muscle. This
makes them an easy bullying target for the antagonists in this story,
Microsoft and Oracle.

On Apr 2, 5:50 pm, Kevin Layman <kevin.lay...@gmail.com> wrote:
> After mulling this over some and discussing with various others I've come to
> the conclusion that there has been some sort of secret deal worked between
> Google and Microsoft, and likely including Google's kept child Mozilla.
>
> Clearly Google as decided for some reason to abandon enabling the browser to
> compete with desktop-like apps. Their first move in this direction was the
> depreciation of Gears. They provided a smokescreen for this by saying they
> attained their goal of getting a commitment from Microsoft to support HTML5
> which would provide the same capabilities as Gears, and that they would
> support Gears until HTML5 was ready. And at that time it may not have been a
> smokescreen, it actually does make sense to push for standards instead of a
> plugin.
>
> But then what happens? Somehow the main standard committee kills the very
> popular Web Database standard that was replacing Gears storage capabilities
> in HTML5, even though if I understand it correctly a Google employee is the
> Chair of the committee?
>
> At the same time Mozilla announces they are dumping Web Database and going
> with IndexedDb, which by any objective analysis is a HUGE step backward for
> developers of database-centric Browser-based apps.  See

> this<http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis-and-the-r...>discussion

[Tac Tacelosky]

Thanks for your posts, the most interesting thing to come across this
list in a while. In fact, if the moderator would put the unsubscribe
link at the bottom of these messages, we'd like lose many members,
especially every time someone posts one of those hyper-demanding
REMOVE ME!!! messages.

I often dismissive of conspiracy theories, but Kevin brings up some
good questions. And conspiracies do exist -- a friend worked on a
project many years ago and found a piece of code in an early Windows
beta that did nothing but block WordPerfect from working under Windows
beta. It was removed before it went live, but it seemed to serve no
purpose except to thwart WP (who made a series of blunders at the time
anyway, another discussion).

I had put some time into Gears when it first came out, believing it
was going to be the "next big thing". And within the environments
that it worked, it rocked. SQLite, off-line apps, js libraries to
geo-location, all done in the browser? Amazing.

I hadn't thought about it being a conspiracy, but admittedly I haven't
been able to come up with any good reasons why Google would drop Gears
now, before most of the HTML5 features are available anywhere. They
easily could have come up with a library that used HTML5 when
available and used the Gears plug-in when it was not.

So maybe it was a secret deal. That makes more sense than any of the
technical reasons they've given.

Tac