Google's New World Order

No doubt about it, Google has Gates-like ambitions. Bill Gates told Fortune magazine in a discussion about Google, …"they are more like us than anyone else we have ever competed with." Clearly, Google is the biggest threat to Microsoft dominance that Microsoft has ever seen.

Amazingly, after less than a year of going public Google is already valued by stockholders at almost one quarter of Microsoft. That is astonishing considering Microsoft's profits of $8.2 billion last year made it the 12th most profitable among the Fortune 500, just behind IBM. Microsoft is the second most valuable company in the world with a market cap of $293 billion. Google's $80 billion cap puts it in a battle to become the most valuable media company. That is just under Time Warner's market capitalization of $82 billion.

All of this from selling key word searches? Not exactly. Yes, all of Google's revenue and profits are coming from key word searches, but its stock price is reflective of huge growth projections that will come from a variety of business initiatives … some of which will strike at the heart of Microsoft itself.

And Microsot is worried as Robert Cringley writing for PBS explains, "That pace of technical development, which probably isn't sustainable for long at any company, isn't POSSIBLE at all at more mature companies like AOL, Yahoo, and especially Microsoft. That adolescent energy is the mojo that makes a startup scarier to Bill Gates than a mature competitor. He knows that if Microsoft ever takes a big dive, it will be because of a Google, not a Yahoo, and certainly not an AOL."

So what is Google up to that concerns Microsoft? The answer is Google Internet. Using its power position on the Internet Google is winning users by providing them simpler alternatives. Google is beating Microsoft in the battle of the Internet. And as Bill Gates stated a decade ago in his forward thinking book, The Road Ahead, "We stand at the brink of another revolution." Unfortunately for Microsoft, it is Google that is the driving force.

Google Search is still light years ahead in terms of result quality and leads all rivals.

Google Talk will become the leader in consumer and small business messaging. It will also make voice communication over the Internet mainstream. Most of us don't do it now … but thanks to Google we will soon.

Google Desktop has already become the leading desktop search app because it works. Searching for files with Explorer that comes with Windows is cumbersome and can take forever.

Google News is one of the leading news sites in World because they did news aggregation better than anyone else. Definitely better than the first news aggregation site on the Web, NewsLinx, which I founded in 1996.

Gmail beats Microsoft's HotMail and Yahoo Mail hands down. It's better at spam filtering and the ads are much more palatable.

Yes, the battle is still young and Microsoft is working to compete. But it seems that Google knows how to win and is slowly knocking off the competition for the hearts and minds of Internet users.

It appears that If Google makes it they will come. One can certainly understand why Microsoft is worried about what Google is up to. Could a Google distributed operating system be next on the list? What do you think? Please give us your thoughts at WebProWorld.

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