IN LESS THAN A WEEK, Google revealed an operating system to compete with Windows, while Microsoft said that Office 10 will feature free, online versions of its four most popular software packages — a jab at Google’s web-based office suite.
Microsoft debuted Bing, its new search engine, less than a month and a half ago, with the hopes of stealing market share from Google and eventually making real money online.
According to reports, it’s a full-fledged tech war, complete with behind-the-scenes maneuvering to impose government regulations on each other.
It’s not a death match, though; rather, it’s a battle to see who will be the King of Technology, because both corporations get their billions from entirely separate channels and are unlikely to injure one other any time soon.
In 2008, Google made $22 billion in income, with 97 percent of that coming from small text advertising purchased by the term and put next to search results or on pages all across the internet. Google generates a small profit by combining its online tools for companies and charging $50 per user per year, but it largely gives away its online text editor, email, and spreadsheet programs for free.
Microsoft, on the other hand, made a $9.3 billion profit on $14.3 billion in sales of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and other business software in the past nine months. Sales of its operating systems, which vary from XP installs on netbooks to Vista, Windows Mobile, and server software, brought in another $16 billion in 2008.
Google is currently working on its own operating systems, beginning with Android, an open-source operating system for tiny devices such as smartphones, and Chrome OS, a browser-focused open-source operating system for laptops and desktops.
Clearly, each company’s top executives look across at the other’s pots of gold and fantasize about methods to steal them, or at the very least make it more difficult for the other man to generate money.
Microsoft’s behind-the-scenes push to sink last year’s proposed Google-Yahoo advertising partnership, or its current attempts to sabotage the Google Book Search settlement, are examples of how they loathe one other.
However, the rivalry is truly about establishing worlds or ecosystems that customers would want to spend their technological lives in. It’s also about ego: a battle to be acknowledged as the world’s most powerful technological business.
Microsoft would prefer for everyone to use its Internet Explorer browser to search through Bing for an article from its MSN site to email to a friend via Hotmail or Outlook.
You have a Microsoft family if you have a smartphone running Windows Mobile and an Xbox in the living room for the kids. Microsoft is the leading platform for software developers of all sorts, whether they are creating small company software, enormous online role-playing games, or photo-editing apps, despite the fact that it is often mocked.
Google’s ecosystem appears to be unique. It begins with a Google Chrome browser (which, interestingly, only runs on Windows) with Google News as the default homepage or a customized Google homepage. You could then go to Gmail and click on a Word document that was provided to you as an attachment, which Google will open for you in its online word processor swiftly and safely.
But, most crucially, Google wants you to use Google to search and navigate the internet, visiting web sites with Google-served advertisements and Google monitoring cookies. You may believe Google is a great corporation for giving away all of this free technology, but you may be unaware of the ongoing and quiet data collecting Google is doing to profile you in order to sell you to marketers for a fee.
So, how do the two compare in four key competition areas?
Internet Explorer, in all of its forms, still commands about 70% of the market (depending on who is counting and how). Even while Microsoft’s current product, IE8, lags behind all other major browsers in terms of functionality and sophisticated online capabilities, the company’s supremacy persists.
Despite the fact that Firefox, Opera, and Apple’s Safari have all pushed browser innovation in the previous five years, most consumers have yet to be persuaded to abandon Internet Explorer, despite the fact that other options are safer and more advanced. What difference does it make? I mean, don’t all Internet Explorer installs come with a default home page?
On the other side, Google’s Chrome browser is a gorgeous, whiz-kid of a browser. It’s slim and agile, and it completely changes the way tabs are managed. The search box is the address bar (Google as default, naturally). Each webpage that is accessed is launched as an own browser instance with limited rights to read and write files. Because tabs are sandboxed, if one website hangs or crashes, the others are untouched. Lower permissions, on the other hand, make it more difficult for a hacker to gain access to your machine via your browser.
Chrome has a market share of less than 2% of the browser market.
Google’s name has become synonymous with online search for the majority of users. Google’s search engine is valuable to the company. It supplied 78.5 percent of search results pages to US online visitors in June. Google made $5.2 billion in income in the first three months of 2009, the majority of which came from AdWords, an auction-based program that triggers adverts based on terms in a search query.
Microsoft recently unveiled Bing, a new search engine that it believed would outperform Google. It has several excellent improvements, and it demonstrates that the firm is working hard to develop new methods to provide information to people by synthesizing data rather than simply fetching links. Despite these advances, a $100 million advertising effort, and favorable press coverage that plays Bing as an underdog, Bing only gained a point in June, giving Microsoft 8.2% of all searches.
