Google is confused, says Microsoft CEO

Ballmer said that in the past few years, India has become significant for Microsoft because of the increase in PC usage in the country

Source : http://www.ciol.com/News/News/News-Reports/Google-is-confused-says-Microsoft-CEO/136869/0/

NEW  DELHI, INDIA: The tussle for claiming leadership in cloud computing space seems to be getting hotter day-by-day. Steve Ballmer, chief executive, Microsoft Corporation did not hesitate to call Google a confused company, of course indirectly, over its concept of Chrome operating system which will be offered for free to users over cloud computing environment.

“At the end of the day, an operating system runs on a piece of hardware. When you say 'operating system in the cloud', it means that the operating system in the device communicates well with the cloud. Today Windows 7 does that brilliantly,” said Ballmer.

Whether it is Internet Explorer or Windows Update Service, Windows is fairly grounded in that position, claimed the Microsoft CEO, who is in India to promote Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud services platform.

“With Internet Explorer 9, we are doing even more. Best of Windows and best of Internet are coming together in it. You mention one of our competitors. Well, it seems that they are a little confused. They have started saying that no box-based operating system needed. To move on, I can’t state the difference between the two myself,” said Ballmer when asked about Microsoft's plan to offer operating system on cloud like Google’s Chrome operating system.

He claimed that his company is clear on concepts and have been approached by numerous companies for its cloud services. “We are strong players and people are coming after us.”

Ballmer mentioned that in the past few years, India has become significant for Microsoft because of the increase in PC usage in the country and improved protection of intellectual property rights (IPR).

“India is among top 5 or 6 PC markets in the world. This is a great sign for us.

Secondly, the significance of this market has increased because of the IPR issue. We have two big giants - the US and China. In the US, IPR is highly protected, in China it is not so well but in India we have seen improvement,” said Ballmer.

Talking about the cloud services platform, Ballmer expressed confidence that India would be one of the major users of cloud computing services.

“India will not only see a surge in consumption of cloud services, driving growth in domestic IT usage, but companies all over the world will look at India to support their transition to cloud computing. Microsoft is committed to helping businesses both in India and across the world to maximize business value by leveraging the benefits that the cloud offers,” said the Microsoft CEO.

On this occasion, Ballmer also inaugurated NIIT’s new course curriculum which will be used to train 100,000 students on Windows Azure over the next three years.

The Top 15 Google Products for People Who Build Websites

The Top 15 Google Products for People Who Build Websites

Google’s strategy of empowering site developers and owners with free and valuable tools has proven to be effective in garnering a fair bit of geek love for the company. But this affinity to Google by technology enthusiasts is not without warrant—they really do make excellent products that can be instrumental in building, maintaining, and improving websites. What’s more, they’re all usually free.

Check out some of the best Google products for developing, analyzing, maintaining and tinkering with websites.

1. Google Chrome Developer Tools

Most developers know the advantages and convenience of testing and debugging in a web browser. It’s this fact that has led to the popularity of browser add-ons such as Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar.

Google Chrome, the latest major entry in the web browser market, has a robust, capable, intuitive, and downright helpful suite of tools geared for developers comparable to—and some might even argue, better than— web development tools such as Firebug. It includes a web page inspector for studying the DOM, a JavaScript console and tab for stack-tracing, debugging, setting breakpoints, and testing scripts, timeline-profiling (akin to YSlow!) of assets being downloaded in a web page for performance tuning, and more.

For Google Chrome users: access the Developer Tools by clicking on the Page icon and then going to Developer > Developer Tools (or pressing Ctrl/Cmd+Shift +I).

2. Webmaster Tools

Though you might balk at the choice of name for this Google product ("Webmaster" is so mid-90’s), you won’t contest the usefulness of Google’s Webmaster Tools. The web-based application, once set up, provides you with plenty of information that can help you maintain and improve your website. It has a Diagnostics set of tools for identifying malware on your site and finding spider-crawl errors. Under the Diagnostics set, Webmaster Tools has an HTML Suggestions page that highlights how you can improve your site’s mark-up.

It additionally lets you discover your most popular web page by way of showing you the number of external links that point to it. It can even point out broken links on your website (see a tutorial on how to do this with Webmaster Tools). All that—and much more— makes the five minutes that this free Google service might take the average site owner to set up, more than worth the time.

3. Google Web Toolkit

Google Web Toolkit is a development framework for web application developers. The framework streamlines the process of making high-performance and well-tuned web apps by giving developers a solid foundation to build their app on, sidestepping issues such as browser quirks and having to write common web functionalities (such as an authentication system).