Microsoft… A word that causes feelings to every human that uses a computer in this planet. These feelings go from anger, disappointment, a love-hate mixture, dependence, true-love and enlightenment, to a real impotence of doing anything against it. Microsoft is lining its army for the big launch of “Vista”, the new version of the Windows operating system.
Nobody doubts the enormous power that Microsoft has, but there’s one company that has managed to declare a public opposition-competition position and has make it to sustain its menace to the Bill Gates’ guys; it’s called (obviously) GOOGLE. It’s really amazing how this battle is taking place with every-day moves that make it look like a chess game.
Microsoft is known for its monopoly problems in the US, the huge fine of 280 Million EURO by the European Union commission for antitrust. It’s also know for playing dirty with its partners (for example: Netscape) and for establishing hard lock-ins to its customers. It’s a model of capitalist company but it’s playing in “shark-waters”. The objective of this post is to evidence how are this “chess-moves” going and how its main competitor Google is playing too.
Microsoft is always a second mover, is a reactor against pressure. In my point of view, the lack of initiative has been evident since it was created, but their huge power has let it (up to now) literally, to kick away the competence. They have an advertising based business model (or at least moving forward to it) as Google does, and here is what is recently happening:
Google launched the first big threat with the online spreadsheets beta test; and as Google always does, for free. This is a clear battle sign that says: “Hey, this Microsoft Office product you have, I’m going to give it for free”. It was a low punch for Microsoft, who immediately reacted with the launch of “Microsoft Live” that for the moment it only has: the Encarta Encyclopedia, MSN live and Outlook live, and it’s planning in the near future to release an internet based office.
Vista is intended, as in other Windows versions, to include embedded the Microsoft explorer with new functions similar to the Firefox, in order to recover audience. Bad move! – This plays against many companies such as: Mozilla Firefox, Real networks, Google, Adobe etc. Of course they reacted and they have created the alliance Real-Networks-Mozilla-Google to cross-promote their products, packaging the new Firefox updates embedded with Google bar and real player.
Vista won’t support OpenGL graphics standard (just as emulation with their Direct3D standard). Apple, Dell and Google joined the Khronos Group that has been working to bring OpenGL graphics to the mobile space. This is anyway a strange move of Google, since their Google-earth product recommends the Direct3D graphics mode, I think because Windows somehow makes OpenGL not to work properly. They are trying to avoid that Microsoft imposes the Direct3D as a standard. As more standards Microsoft owns, the more power it has.
Integration between MSN and Yahoo instant messaging, this was really a non expected move, since months ago Yahoo refused a partnership proposal to Microsoft in sharing the search engine power, and its CEO stated that there were no intentions of a partnership with Microsoft at all. The relations didn’t appear to be good, and that’s maybe why Google haven’t made a response, in the other hand, the messaging is not the Google’s hard brick. It seems to be a response to AOL instant messaging integration with AIM and ICQ.
There is an intense battle of the Microsoft-vs.-world type. As an advertising-based business model, I think that Google has a much cleverer approach, Microsoft advertising is annoying, people is tired of banners and Microsoft puts them all around, instead, Google’s advertisements are interesting, helpful, context based and subtle. In the other hand, unfortunately in this battle, Google has acquired some of the bad manners of its main competitor in terms of monopoly.
It seems that in the technology industry, monopolies will occur indefinitely, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, a new one… who knows, users just want to deal with one, and just time will say which, – hasta la VISTA!