Why the battle of the behemoths is good for business

We haven’t had a good stand-up fight in the computer industry for years; however it appears we now have the biggest ever as Google and Microsoft clash. This is good news for computer users.

In the last few weeks, Microsoft have announced their relaunched Bing search engine, ramped up their advertising arm and intend to make many of Office’s features available online.

All three of these, particularly the search and advertising functions, are aimed at Google’s core businesses, so Google responding with a new Chrome operating system wasn’t a total surprise.

What makes this battle between behemoths so interesting is how different the two organisations are – one was founded by baby boomers, grew organically and pretty well brought the desktop computer to the masses, while the other is a Gen X organisation, funded by Silicon Valley and brought online advertising to the masses.

Despite being big organisations, both are vulnerable from industry trends and from the global financial crisis.

In many ways, the world economic situation is the biggest threat to both.

For Google, reduced advertising by cash-strapped businesses will hurt, while at Microsoft those businesses and their customers aren’t going to be keen to buy new computers.

So it will be interesting to see how this plays out. It’s difficult to see how Google will overtake Microsoft’s operating system domination with Chrome, particularly given Windows 7 will be well bedded down by Chrome’s projected “late 2010” release.

On the other hand, it’s also hard to identify where Bing will make serious inroads into Google search’s user base or how Microsoft will budge Google’s dominant position in online advertising.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be fascinating watching to see how this affects the business community. When we’ve had battles like this in the past, such as the browser wars, Microsoft versus IBM and IBM versus clone computers, it’s been small business and consumers who’ve been the winners.

Just out of interest, I’ll be talking with Microsoft tomorrow night (Wednesday 15) about their new operating system on the Tony Delroy ABC Nightlife program from 10pm AEST. So if you have any questions, please call in and we’ll be happy to answer them.

Paul Wallbank is a writer, speaker and broadcaster on technology issues. He founded national support organisation PC Rescue in 1995 and has spent over 14 years helping businesses get the most from their IT investment. His PC Rescue and IT Queries websites provide free advice to business computer users and his monthly newsletter has over 3000 subscribers.

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