SubscribeFortune is running a lengthy article about the threat that Google poses to Microsoft, though this should be more or less common sense to everybody.
He sure got that right. Today Google isn’t just a hugely successful search engine; it has morphed into a software company and is emerging as a major threat to Microsoft’s dominance. You can use Google software with any Internet browser to search the web and your desktop for just about anything; send and store up to two gigabytes of e-mail via Gmail (Hotmail, Microsoft’s rival free e-mail service, offers 250 megabytes, a fraction of that); manage, edit, and send digital photographs using Google’s Picasa software, easily the best PC photo software out there; and, through Google’s Blogger, create, post online, and print formatted documents—all without applications from Microsoft.
And I fail to see how this is bad for anybody except Microsoft. What we are seeing, finally, is a way to subvert the dominant Microsoft paradigm, that is, all things computer are Microsoft, as well. Open-source advocates have been subverting this for years, naturally, but the majority of the computing populace is still laboring under the delusions that Microsoft is the only company that makes computer software. Read on:
Its ambitious new operating system, code-named Longhorn, is more than a year late, even after having been scaled back. Linux, the free operating system that Gates once scoffed at, is fighting Microsoft for share in both the server and desktop markets, forcing the company to do the unthinkable: offer customer discounts. Last year it had to spend $1 billion to rewrite thousands of lines of code to make its programs less susceptible to viruses. Its Xbox gaming console is winning raves from players but has yet to make serious money. Meanwhile, Apple has stolen the show in online music with its hugely popular iPod and iTunes Music Store. Plus, the recently released Firefox browser, which can be downloaded free, has forced Gates to reconstitute an Internet Explorer development team. Indeed, four years have passed since Microsoft released a piece of software that generated the kind of buzz Google seems to generate every month.
The last half of the 90s saw Microsoft reigning supreme; they squashed Netscape, Corel, and others. But then they were hit with antitrust suits, and they suffered the fate that many large, established companies do: they got corpulent and slow. Instead of the attracting the cream of the technology elite, they began losing those employees to Google, where true innovation is taking place. Google primarily uses Linux on its ~250′000 search servers, for instance. Google is constantly pushing new products: Microsoft currently seems content to make minor updates to existing products (much of it bloat), and hasn’t put out anything new and exciting in awhile. They are stagnating, and you can’t stagnate in the technology industry. They’re living off their savings, so to speak, but those are dwindling.
I’m not sure that Google is going to be writing an operating system any time soon (there are rumors, of course, because of kernel engineers that Google has hired, but the most logical explanation for that is the customized Linux kernel that runs the search functions), but Google’s very pervasive nature is a threat to the intellectual monopoly that Microsoft holds on the tech industry: a monopoly so complete that it has become almost transparent. That another company exists that is leading the way in innovation of search and service means that Microsoft’s guru status is in jeopardy.
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