Substitute Microsoft for Google and yes, people would be far more up in arms about it.

“Why?” you ask? Do you really need that spelt out for you?

Microsoft has based its entire business history on unethical actions and slippery business tactics. They did not get ahead in the world by being the best at their products; they got ahead by screwing over anyone they could get away with screwing.

Google on the other hand has based its rep and business practices on delivering the ‘best’ product. They haven’t gotten ahead by double dealing, underhanded tactics, or screwing over people.

Yes, Google HAS done things that people don’t agree with. But none of the things that people point out are deliberate attempts to screw with people.

Microsoft got in bed with companies telling them that they were specifically planning on doing X, while secretly planning on doing Y. They did this, as has been documented, to give Microsoft an edge in its own competing product.

Google has had van drivers accidentally drive up someone’s driveway while taking low resolution pictures. One had malice in their intent; one simply made a mistake.

Microsoft stole, actually STOLE, someone’s code and distributed it as part of Win9x. They didn’t even bother to remove the copyright strings in the binary and only stopped distributing it when they were found guilty by a jury (see Stac Electronics).

Google had two engineers in their off time who copied an extremely generic idea and placed it in their gallery of “look what you can do with this new toy we have!” and took it down when it became apparent that there would be hard feelings over it.

There is a reason why Microsoft gets the shit treatment and Google doesn’t. And it’s not because everyone here has “Google fever”. It’s because so far Google acts responsibly and ethically while so far Microsoft acts predatory and unethically.

I agree, I followed this controversy and frankly the issue is that both huddlechat and campfire look exactly like many of the AIM clients out there. They have the same layout and very similar features. They even look like toned down MSN chat applications. If you design to the style du-jour it is totally likely that you will look similar especially in a similar arena, chat clients. I think the issue here is that the domain is so minimal that any client who tries the bare minimum of ajax web chat with file uploads will end up being the same. So I guess 37signals is claiming they somehow own the minimal implementation. Well they don’t, it is an obvious idea and they should buck up.

I think they pulled the app mostly for PR reasons; not that the app generated tons of bad PR but that it was distracting people from what google wanted them talking about. Rather than argue about their right to have the app, they simply pulled it so people wouldn’t be able to argue about it on the blogosphere.

> they simply pulled it so people wouldn’t be able to argue about it on the blogosphere.

Front page on Slashdot. Wow, they sure dodged that bullet.

So, what is the possibility of Google taking down google docs, in response to complaints from MS, or some other online office software provider?

As best I understand, the Ruby on Rails cultists are one of the main developer groups they’re counting on as App Engine customers, so they don’t want to offend its leader. Annoying Microsoft doesn’t cost them anyone they want to work with, and might help.

37Signals is the marketing force behind Ruby on Rails, and Google’s AppEngine is heavily geared toward Django, which the RoR world seems to consider a big threat due to Django’s allegedly superior robustness and speed. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d spent their time since the announcement of AppEngine looking for something to act martyred about and hopefully redirect some buzz toward their own offering.

In which case Google probably did the right thing disabling the trivial app before the buzz hijack could succeed.

Or maybe I’ve been in this industry too long and I’m just way bitter, I don’t know.

It’s just a nice web interface to a chat room, hardly revolutionary. Anyone getting hot under the collar about someone copying it has a great future ahead of them in the patent troll business.

Sure if they copied it exactly feature for feature and took the interface then it’s understandable but otherwise…

Based on this article I think I will make a low feature program that allows people to look at remote “pages” and view them in a standardized format. Yes, yes similar things have been done before, but my product will be sub par and do nothing revolutionary.

And if anyone else tries to “copy” that Ill go after them with a vengeance.

I applaud them for their principled stand, but I ridicule them for this decision. It was surely taken in the interests of staving off a good ‘ole web flaming then any sensible grounds. There are so many of these applications of this style and format around that I find it hard buy their argument.

And I, for one, would find this kind of demo application extremely interesting. It always interesting to see how these things are done.

Bottom line - I think there is nothing intrinsically special with this kind of application, any of us with a modest amount of programming experience could of knocked it up. It is always interested to see a standard basic application in a new system as a common ground to allow ease of adoption. For that reason there is a bunch of “hello worlds”, “simple graphs” and so forth. On a web development system you would expect by the same argument to see “tables”, “blogs”, “portals” and the “simple chat” as their demos. This is like MS trying to stop the notepad demo that comes with some windows compilers, or LiveJournal trying to stop the blog demo that came with GWT. Totally Daft.

Go on, reinstate it!

“We’re flattered Google thinks Campfire is a great product,” said Jason Fried, 37signals CEO and co-founder. “We’re just disappointed that they stooped so low to basically copy it feature for feature, layout for layout. We thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe its time to reevaluate what they stand for.” From http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080408-123318 [searchenginewatch.com]