Anant Arora at A a T m A n...conversations with the self

Google is GOD…But for how Long?

This is the third war that Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and Microsoft’s Bill Gates are fighting. Schmidt has lost to Gates on the earlier two accounts, once when he was the CEO of Sun Microsystems and second, when he was the CEO of Novell.

When you draw a comparison of how Gates shuts down the business of his counterparts, first thing that comes to mind is the browser war fought between MS and Netscape. In September ’95, when Netscape was the undisputed leader in Browser business, they were sitting pretty thinking Gates does not have the potential to innovate and can only imitate, thus it would always be catching with Netscape but won’t be able to surpass it. Netscape had gone public a few months back and sitting pretty on the revenues, Gates turned up the war and Netscape…was closed. Google has parallel qualities of what Netscape had then, they have just gone public, high revenue, brand recognition ad nauseam.

Microsoft is quickly catching up with Google in search business, launching last month a search engine that is designed to answer questions posed in everyday language and to serve results customized to user’s geographic location. To add to it, Microsoft sits on a pile of $50 Billion in cash, and if they get serious with the search business, and you have every reason to believe that they will, Google would need a smart and cagy flawless strategy in order to sustain. The big question is: Can Google do it!

posted by Anant Arora @ 7:33 PM