The new fight of the year between two giant corporations is going to get interesting. And I'm not talking about Microsoft and Linux, but a new opponent, Microsoft and Google. We could say that this competition started a long time ago, and the first case that comes to mind is the battle for mail and instant messaging services. Hotmail / GMail They are two of the most used services today, however today I think that GMail has gained space by truly becoming a complete online laboratory of mails, help, tools and options for you to order, save and manage everything very easily. Hotmail I don't even use it anymore, very rarely does it open well Firefox, has been far behind in time with its development, although the last change I knew to see was having seen it become something like a social network.
Messenger / GTalk they also fight. What is the difference that I find, my GTalk opens in just 3 seconds, with the list of those who are online, my Messenger takes its time to load, and when it does, it opens Msn Live, Msn Today, Msn Tomorrow, Msn of the future, more banners than if you roll over it, they are displayed beyond the screen, etc. Memory consumption of Msn: 51MB, consume of GTalk: 5MB.
I think the issue was aggravated perhaps with the financing by Google to Mozilla to develop what is today one of the most used web browsers, Firefox, which has totally displaced IE. And even worse, when Google launched its own Chrome web browser, fighting for the top 3 podium very quickly.
The next move gave it Microsoft recently launching its new online search engine Bing, which in a short time has become a curious competition in the world of search engines. Just to do the test, I looked at the statistics of one of my blogs, the one that receives the most visits (about 3000 to 4000), and I compared the use of search engines in the last month, with those of last month. The result: a growth in blog entry through 61% Google, and by Bing, 820.17%. Be careful, this is a curious fact taken out of context, a lot of this has to do with the way the blog is indexed in each search engine, the order in which it appears in the results, etc. however, it cannot be denied that in a single month Bing became a widely used search engine.
Then we come to today, where the battle finds them in a new, more than interesting round, with crossfire and great changes. On the Google side: the big announcement of Google Chrome OS, a dedicated operating system for notebooks based on the Linux kernel. Microsoft's (Ballmer) answer:
"I'm going to be respectful" Does anyone know what that is about? Chrome OS is something very interesting for me. It will not arrive for another year and a half and they are already announcing an operating system. We don't need any new operating system. We already have one ”.
Sounds like a tantrum, doesn't it? And on the side of Microsoft: Microsoft Office it will be an online application, to compete obviously with Google Docs. And in this giant movement, one of Microsoft's strong pillars will remain in the way of collecting money, a sacrifice that seems almost mandatory to counteract the loss of power in the office automation area.
I am left with a phrase from Ballmer which I think could not be more wrong:
"People with a PC only spend half their time on the Internet."
If we evaluate all these movements on a large scale, it seems to me that the fight is almost entirely over the Internet, that vast territory full of consumers, that direct channel to each one's home, be it with a new web browser, a more powerful search engine, a online operating system, a mail service, a chat service, everything goes back to the strategic battle for the virtual land that is the internet.
And forgive me for the Spoiler: if we talk about the internet, I think there is no other apparent winner in years than Google. Because it's free, because it's usable, because it's easy, and because it's useful.