Paul A. Strassman’s provocative little essay in the Oct. 4 Computerworld (registration may be required) insightfully compares Microsoft’s business model with Google’s. Here’s a sample:
Now a new Microsoft challenger is emerging on the horizon: Google. What makes Google different is that it follows innovative rules as it carves out a share of the IT business. Google’s emerging strategy may give us a clue as to who may be bidding for IT leadership in our uncertain industry by the end of this decade.
Microsoft’s power is based on selling customers software that becomes a sequence of increasingly sticky entanglements. Once you’ve installed Microsoft operating software on a desktop, laptop or cell phone, the steadily increasing inclusiveness of features will raise your costs for choosing any alternative. Google, on the other hand, relies on a generic browser to gain access to a rapidly growing menu of services.
For Microsoft, one might substitute Blackboard or WebCT or any of a number of course/learning management systems. What’s the T & L analogy to Google?
I don’t know if there’s one company that can wield the Google banner (except maybe Google itself) but how about weblogs? Wikis? Social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us and Furl? Flickr? Anything that’s easy to use, easy to get content in (and out), and that plays well with others via open API’s (notice extended hacks of del.icio.us that visualize metatags, or post non-Webified content) and RSS…
Good question. But I would not ask that question because I don’t want to see that there is only ONE Google if and when Microsoft is dead.
Google’s parasitical with MS for now. Note its increasing reliance on IE, despite that browser’s decline in estimation and usage. Or turn it around, and look at the constellation of emergent Googlespawn – where’s the OS to come?
For teaching and learning, there’s nothing like Google in terms of openness, accessibility, and ease of use. BlackBoard and WebCT are the precise opposite, being silo-oriented systems (among other things). Given its ubiquity, perhaps email is the only analogue.
What can Microsoft do to hurt Google. I’m surprised, coming from MS that you don’t acknowledge the obvious: 95% of Google’s customers come to the via Windows. By making search integrated into the Vista OS, defaulting to live,com and bypassing the browser, MS — just by providing search results that are “good enough†for most customers — can put a big dent in Google’s revenue. Could be why Google is trying so desperately to diversify their product offerings beyond browser-based search.
People make such a big deal about Google Office taking aim at Microsoft’s major source of income, while never acknowledging just how vulnerable Google’s single source of income is.The concept of storing my sensitive excel data in the web scares me.The google docs which they have given so much hype is not better than an average HTML Editor. .