Pete P
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Microsoft enters that battle from a stronghold: its lucrative, powerful business in personal computer software. Google has asserted that Microsoft's next Web browser typically steers users to Microsoft's search service, limiting consumer choice and potentially hurting Google, the leading Internet search engine.
Microsoft says Google's objections are mistaken, and that its new browser, Internet Explorer 7, increases a user's search options.
But Google has advantages of its own, and the Internet services business is very different from the desktop software industry.
The Internet model is one that offers search, e-mail, calendar, contacts and even word processing as services accessible remotely with a PC or hand-held device with a Web browser. Typically, Google invents a new service or feature, makes it a free Web-based service, and only later figures out how to make money on it from advertising of some kind.
That ad-supported software, distributed as a Web service, is a threat to Microsoft's model of selling licensed desktop software, at least in the consumer market. Corporations have so far shown less interest in ad-supported software as an Internet service.
To smaller software companies, Google's strategy appears to have the same competitive impact as Microsoft's tried-and-true practice of bundling more software programs and features into its Windows operating system.
How far Google can eat into Microsoft's software franchise is uncertain. But Microsoft fears that Google could become a kind of operating system of the Internet in the same way that Windows is the dominant operating system of personal computing.
For its part, Google wants to avoid becoming the "next Netscape," a reference to the early leader in the browser market that Microsoft eventually thwarted. |
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