In my ongoing obsession with the battle of the titans (Google, Yahoo, and MSN), and more specifically Google, “Robert Cringely’s surmisal that”:http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.html
bq. And there lies the differences between the two companies. Last week, I wrote about Windows Live and Office Live as Microsoft’s best attempts at pretending to be Google. And Google will do those kinds of applications, too. But they’ll build them atop a network infrastructure that Microsoft can’t match.
But that doesn’t mean Microsoft customers will be denied access to the Google Internet. Quite the contrary. Google would be insane to exclude Microsoft customers, which will be as welcome as any other. Only Google will be benefiting far more than Microsoft from that usage.
Google has the reach and the resources to make this work. There are only so many fiber networks and they’ll be BUYING service from those outfits — many of which are in or near bankruptcy. Say the containers cost $500,000 each in volume and $500,000 per year to run. That’s $300 million to essentially co-opt the Internet. And you know whose strategy this is? Wal-Mart’s. And unless Google comes up with an ecosystem to allow their survival, that means all the other web services companies will be marginalized. There will be startups and little guys, but no medium-sized companies. ISPs, which we’ve thought of as a threatened species, won’t be touched, but then their profit margins are so low they aren’t worth touching. After all, Wal-Mart doesn’t try to own the roads its goods are carried over. And the final result is that Web 2.0 IS Google.
Microsoft can’t compete. Yahoo probably can’t compete. Sun and IBM are like remora, along for the ride. And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion? That’s less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year.
Game over.
Hat tip to “The Daily Whim”:http://photodude.com/links/2784/google-mart
The reality is, folks, that Google is a business with a business plan and obviously “Wall street sees it as a profitable one”:http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=goog. All of these “gimmicks” that Google keeps releasing are not gimmicks. They are part of a master plan to make themeselves the all-time, all-inclusive source for not only information, but for services, applications and yes, even platforms.
Google is poised to take over the computing market because, let’s face it, you can get a web browser on Mac, Linux and Windows. You can get broadband that services all three. They have a perfectly _cross_-platform platform. Let Microsoft have Windows. Let Apple have OS X. They see themselves as the mecca for users on all these platforms.
Imagine a truly cross-platform office suite. You work on a spreadsheet at work via Google’s Excel competitor. You come home and want to work on it at home but you don’t have the same computer OS or Office version to work on it in Excel. But you don’t need to because it is saved in your shared drive on Google, in a Google-standardized format with no version differences.
Or maybe you’re a media afficonado. You’ve got 25 Gigs of music and you want to be able to listen to your music collection at home or on your laptop at some wifi hotspot. With a Google media player, you have access to the same resources no matter where you are.
See the possibilities?
